I was flying by the window when you were so horrid and spunky. I don’t like the children who are horrid and spunky. I hope you’ll be different to-morrow.
Good-bye,
Crow.”
After this kind of letter one felt more than ever ashamed.
Maybe the Good Crow would put a different sort of letter under the pillow:
“Dear Little Friend:
It made me glad to see what you did to-day. I like children who eat what is set before them at the table. I send you a lollipop as a reward of merit. Happy dreams.
Good-bye,
Crow.”
One might come home from school and find that Aunt Phoebe’s crow had flown in at Aunt Phoebe’s window during school hours to leave tickets to go to a special children’s performance of Alice in Wonderland to be on Saturday afternoon. Oh, the crow was always doing things that were happy. And, you know, Aunt Phoebe kept him fully informed as to what the children liked best. She knew.
Mother and Daddy and Aunt Phoebe all liked the crow. Indeed, strange to relate, sometimes when Aunt Phoebe was visiting and Mother happened to say that she had admired a certain kind of pretty plant that she had seen in a window down-town, the crow brought the plant and set it in the middle of the dining-room table next day! He left a card with it, of course. The card said, “With love from the children’s Crow.” (Of course, a real crow couldn’t have carried the things that Caw Caw did. Being a play crow and just pretend, he could bring almost anything.)
Oh, I tell you it was jolly! Everybody in the house crowed with laughter over Aunt Phoebe’s Caw Caw. He made jokes; he sent funny pictures cut from magazines; he wrote rhymes and verses that made Mother and Daddy and Jimsi and Henry and Katherine—and even Aunt Phoebe herself—just double up and laugh. One day he left each of the children a big black feather. The feathers were done up in reams and reams of tissue paper. You’d have thought there were BIG presents in the parcels that were waiting on the hall table till Jimsi and Henry came home from school! And then after unrolling and unrolling and unrolling and unrolling out dropped the black feathers. They looked as if somebody had found them in the feather duster but they were labeled, “From Caw Caw’s wing, with love. Keep to remember me.”