“You wouldn’t joke if this old Cricket was in your room,” Johnnie grumbled.
He did not grumble often. But he had had a long, hard day, swimming in the mill-pond and climbing apple trees. And he wanted to go to sleep.
Johnnie Green thought it was no time to crack jokes.
VIII
PLEASING JOHNNIE GREEN
Johnnie Green knew that he could never find the Cricket in the dark. So he crawled out of bed and lighted a candle, blinking a few moments in its flickering flame.
From his hiding place in the crack of the baseboard, in a corner of Johnnie Green’s chamber, Chirpy Cricket saw the gleam of the candle. And he wondered whether it might be a relation of Freddie Firefly. It seemed to have a trick of moving about in a jerky fashion, as if it didn’t know where it was going and didn’t greatly care, so long as it was on the move.
Chirpy Cricket kept still as a mouse then. He soon saw that the bearer of the bright light was quite unlike Freddie Firefly, in one way. He made a tremendous racket, knocking over almost everything in the room.