“Why don’t you open your letter?”
he asked.
“I hadn’t thought of that,” Sandy
replied. So he tore open the envelope and pulled
out a paper.
“It’s certainly for me,” he said,
“for here’s my picture again. But
I’d like to know why these other people have
their pictures in my letter. They’ve
no business in my letter!”
Mr. Crow looked over Sandy’s shoulder—which
was not at all a polite thing to do.
“That’s queer!” Mr. Crow exclaimed.
“There’s one of the Red-Squirrel boys
and Mrs. Mouse’s son. And this young chap
here looks a lot like Rinaldo Rat. ... I’d
be pretty angry if anybody sent me a letter like that,”
Mr. Crow then said.
Now, the real trouble with Mr. Crow was that he was
jealous because Sandy Chipmunk had a letter, while
he had none.
“I’d throw that letter away, if it was
mine,” remarked Mr. Crow. And he said so
much that at last Sandy Chipmunk tossed the letter
away and went off to hunt for birds’ eggs.
As soon as Sandy was out of sight, Mr. Crow picked
up the letter and flew home with it.
He felt better—because at last he had a
letter, while Sandy Chipmunk no longer had one.
That very afternoon Farmer Green drove to the village.
And on his way he stopped at the houses of several
of his neighbors, to talk about the weather and the
crops. And each one of them showed him a letter
that had come that day, telling all about a new kind
of poison, to rid a farmer of chipmunks and red squirrels
and rats and mice.
“Sprinkle our powder around your corn-crib,”
the letter said, “and these little rodents will
trouble you no longer.”
“I declare!” cried Farmer Green at last.
“I seem to be the only person in the neighborhood
that didn’t get one of those letters.”
Then he happened to remember the letter Sandy Chipmunk
had carried away in his mouth. “It must
have been that letter that the chipmunk stole out of
my mail-box!” Farmer Green said. And that
night, when he reached home and told his family about
the letter, his son Johnnie laughed harder than ever.
“That must be a wise chipmunk!” Johnnie
Green exclaimed. “I wish I could catch
him and put him in my squirrel cage.”
“I wish he’d leave my mail alone,”
said Farmer Green. “The next thing we know,
he’ll be taking my newspaper to read. And
maybe he’ll come right into the house and borrow
my spectacles.”
Johnnie Green seemed to think his father was joking.
And perhaps he was.
What do you think about it?
A RIDE TO THE MILLER’S
Do you know about the time Johnnie Green and his grandmother
and Sandy Chipmunk started for the miller’s
with a sack of wheat to be ground? If you never
heard the story, this is the way it happened—and
if you have heard it, it happened this way,
just the same:
