"The turtle wants to know why you don't keep your promises. He has been waiting this half hour, and sends word that it is a shame for you to sleep away the beautiful morning hours."
Minnie sprang to her feet at once, and was following the beetle, when squeak, squeak! ho, hallo! wait a minute, Minnie! came from every room she attempted to pass.
She found that mouse had not kept her promise of coming home, and, sending a message to the turtle, she was obliged to wait and hear a hundred questions and complaints, and settle a hundred disputes between the quarrelsome young ones.
One had pushed the other out of bed; one had trodden on the other's tail; one tickled the other so that he could not sleep; one snored so loud it made another nervous; one had eaten up the other's grain.
As Minnie crept about in this dark, disagreeable place, so full of angry voices, she remembered that lost home of hers, where all was peace and love. She remembered dear Franky, with his rosy cheeks and curly hair,--the good, generous little fellow that he was; and baby Alice, with her large brown eyes; and the kind parents who never went away and forgot their little ones.
Then she rummaged the store-rooms for food; and, not finding enough to satisfy the greedy mice, crept out into the air to see if she could not pick up something for their breakfast.
She saw no turtle. The grass was bent still with his foot-tracks, but he was gone. So Minnie went busily to work picking off seeds and berries, and the honeyed end of clover-blossoms, till she had such a heap that it seemed to her she could never carry it all into the nest.
Then thinking, "Perhaps, if I set the mice at work, it will stop their quarrelling," she called out several of the elder broods.