“It’s my appetite, partly,” Solomon Owl said. “Nothing tastes as it did when I was a youngster. And I keep longing for something, though what it is I can’t just tell.”
Aunt Polly Woodchuck nodded her head wisely.
“What have you been eating lately?” she asked.
Solomon Owl replied that he hadn’t eaten anything but mice since the leaves began to turn.
“H-m—the leaves are nearly all off the trees now,” the old lady remarked. “How many mice have you eaten in that time?”
Solomon said that as nearly as he could remember he had eaten twenty-seven—or a hundred and twenty-seven. He couldn’t say which—but one of those numbers was correct.
Aunt Polly Woodchuck threw up her hands.
“Sakes alive!” she cried. “It’s no wonder you don’t feel well! What you need is a change of food. And it’s lucky you came to me now. If you’d gone on like that much longer I’d hate to say what might have happened to you. You’d have had dyspepsia, or some other sort of misery in your stomach.”
“What shall I do?” asked Solomon Owl. “Insects are scarce at this season of the year. Of course, there are frogs—but I don’t seem to care for them. And there are fish—but they’re not easy to get, for they don’t come out of the water and sit on the bank, as the frogs do.”
“How about pullets?” Aunt Polly inquired.