“That’s queer!” Uncle Sammy Coon
exclaimed. “It was full this afternoon.
And now there’s not an ear left. I don’t
remember eating it.” He thought deeply
for a long time. And after a while he said to
himself: “I wonder if it could have been
that Chipmunk boy?” But he decided that Sandy
was too small to have carried away all those big ears
under his very nose. “I must have eaten
it,” he told himself. “I’m getting
terribly forgetful.”
And since he thought he had already had his supper,
Uncle Sammy Coon went to bed without any supper at
all.
WORKING FOR MR. CROW
Old Mr. Crow had decided that he would not fly south
to spend the winter. He said he was getting almost
too old for such a long journey. And he remembered,
too, that he had heard the weather was going to be
mild that winter.
“There’s just one thing that worries me,”
he told Aunt Polly Woodchuck one day, when he was
talking the matter over with her. “I don’t
know what I shall have to eat.”
“Why, you can sleep until spring, just as I
do,” Aunt Polly said. “Then you won’t
want anything to eat.”
But Mr. Crow said he was a light sleeper and that
he could no more sleep the whole winter long than
Aunt Polly could fly.
“Then why don’t you store up some corn,
the way the squirrels do?” she asked him.
There was one thing about Aunt Polly—she
always had a remedy for everything.
“That’s a good idea!” Mr. Crow told
her. “Maybe I can get somebody to help
me, too.”
And that very day he went to Sandy Chipmunk and asked
him if he didn’t want to gather some food for
him.
“How much will you pay me?” Sandy asked
him.
“I’ll give you half what you gather for
me,” said Mr. Crow. “And that’s
certainly fair, I’m sure. It’s often
done. And it’s called ’working at
the halves.’”
It seemed fair to Sandy Chipmunk, too.
“That’s a bargain,” he said.
“I’ll begin right away. Where do you
want me to hide the food for you, Mr. Crow?”
Old Mr. Crow told Sandy to put it in his house in
the top of the tall elm tree.
“I don’t like to climb so high,”
Sandy objected. “You know I’m not
so good a climber as Frisky Squirrel. He wouldn’t
mind climbing up to your house. But it might
make me dizzy.”
“Well,” said Mr. Crow, “why don’t
you bring the food to the foot of my tree and get
Frisky Squirrel to carry it to the top?”
“I’ll do it,” said Sandy Chipmunk—“if
Frisky is willing.” So he went off to find
Frisky Squirrel, who proved to be much interested in
the plan.
“How much will you pay me?” he asked Sandy
Chipmunk.
“I suppose you ought to have half the food,”
Sandy said. “That’s what Mr. Crow
is paying me.”
Frisky Squirrel said that that seemed fair. So
they set to work at once. And every time Sandy
brought a load of food to the foot of the tall elm,
where Mr. Crow lived, he found Frisky Squirrel waiting
for him.
