"I won't tell anybody," Buster promised.
"Oh, I didn't mean that, exactly," Mr. Crow told him hastily. "If you want to inform your friends how clever I am, I have no objection, of course."
Then Buster went off, thinking what a kind person old Mr. Crow was. And that very afternoon, long before sunset, he curled himself up in an out-of-the-way corner of the house and went to sleep. Everybody was so busy hurrying in and out in order to finish the day's work that no one noticed or disturbed him. And when the trumpeter sounded the rising call the next morning Buster Bumblebee was actually the first one in the house to open his eyes and jump up and hasten out to get his breakfast.
All of which only went to prove that old Mr. Crow knew a thing or two—and maybe even more.
VI
JOHNNIE GREEN IS STUNG
There had been so much rain early in the summer that even by the middle of August Farmer Green had not been able to finish his haying. His son Johnnie was sorry, too—because he had to work in the hot hayfield almost every day, when he would far rather have gone swimming in the mill-pond, under the shade of the great willow.
Sometimes Johnnie rode on the hayrake. And since he liked to drive the old horse Ebenezer, he didn't object to that part of his duties so much. What he hated most was pitching hay with a pitchfork. And next to that, he disliked going to the spring for a jugful of water.
But those unpleasant tasks were nothing at all compared with what happened to him one day when he stepped squarely upon the doorway of the Bumblebee family's house.