Somehow he always knew exactly where to begin. Although he carried no sheets of music with him, he never had to stop and wonder what note to begin on, for the reason that he always fiddled on the same one.
When rude people asked Chirpy Cricket—as they did now and then—why he didn’t change his tune, he always replied that a person couldn’t change anything without taking time. And since he expected to make only a short stay in Pleasant Valley he didn’t want to fritter away any precious moments.
Chirpy Cricket’s neighbors soon noticed that he carried his fiddle with him everywhere he went. And the curious ones asked him a question. “Why”—they inquired—“why are you forever taking your fiddle with you?”
And Chirpy Cricket reminded them that the summer would be gone almost before anybody knew it. He said that when he wanted to play a tune he didn’t intend to waste any valuable time hunting for his fiddle.
Now, all that was true enough. But it was just as true that he couldn’t have left his fiddle at home anyhow. Chirpy made his music with his two wings. He rubbed a file-like ridge of one on a rough part of the other. So his fiddle—if you could call it by that name—just naturally had to go wherever he did.
Cr-r-r-i! cr-r-r-i! cr-r-r-i! When that shrill sound, all on one note, rang out in the night everybody that heard it knew that Chirpy Cricket was sawing out his odd music. And the warmer the night the faster he played. He liked warm weather. Somehow it seemed to make him feel especially lively.
People who wanted to be disagreeable were always remarking in Chirpy Cricket’s hearing that they hoped there would be an early frost. They thought of course he would know they were tired of his music and wished he would keep still.
But such speeches only made him fiddle the faster. “An early frost!” he would exclaim. “I must hurry if I’m to finish my summer’s fiddling.”
Now, Chirpy had dozens and dozens of relations living in holes of their own, in the farmyard or the fields. And the gentlemen were all musical. Like him, they were fiddlers. Somehow fiddling ran in their family. So on warm nights, during the last half of the summer, there was sure to be a Crickets’ concert.
Sometimes it seemed to Johnnie Green, who lived in the farmhouse, as if Chirpy Cricket and his relations were trying to drown the songs of the musical Frog family, over in the swamp.