“Bother your six hundred thousand children!” growled a crusty philosopher. “If they are dead, it is the only good thing ever I heard about them. It might be worth while to have one's country crashing about one's ears occasionally, for the sake of being well rid of such trash. Here are all our laboratories broken up, and the sun's occupation gone, and you making a to-do about a parcel of babies!”
“O the sweet sunshine!” wept a poet, but most musically,—“the warm, delicious sunshine, that our hungry souls can feed upon no more, nor ever fill our drinking-cups with nectared dew!”
And so in Mapleton and Sumachford and through all Leafland was nothing heard but the voice of lamentation, and nothing seen but floods of tears, and nothing thought of but how to avert or escape the threatened calamity; and, in their terror and trouble, the Leaflanders almost lost their fine tempers, and were often on the brink of quarrelling; and the people walking in Netherworld met each other under blue cotton umbrellas, and exclaimed, “What a spell of weather!” and altogether it was very uncomfortable, both in Leafland and Netherworld.
Just at this time a gay young Chipmonk appeared upon the scene,—a careless, dashing, saucy fellow, very popular among the young Leaflanders of the rapid sort. He came skipping and frisking into Nutham, as his manner was, both pockets full of corn which he had confiscated, he remarked significantly, from a field down yonder. He nodded jauntily right and left, and then disposed himself comfortably in a corner, and began cracking his dainties in a very free-and-easy manner, not noticing the woe-begone aspect of his friends. All at once, however, he awoke to a realizing sense of things, and showed his sympathy after his own fashion, by giving a sudden flirt with his tail, and calling out, irreverently, “What's the row?”
Amid tears and sighs, the sad story was related to him, in all its length and breadth and thickness; but, instead of the answering tear and sigh which his auditors expected, he only thrust his paws into his pockets, and whisked his tail over his back in frantic convulsions of laughter; muttering, as breath came to him in the pauses, “O, what a gony! For that matter, O, what a pack of gonies!”
Now the Leaflanders were quite too well-bred ever to have used or heard so barbarous a word as “gony.” Nevertheless, reason and instinct both taught them, as it will teach all people of refined sensibilities, that to be called a gony is to be called something very disagreeable; and if anything can heighten the unpleasant sensation, it is to be called “a pack of gonies.” Consequently the Leaflanders began to look at each other blankly, and even to suspect that possibly they had been making fools of themselves. But Chipmonk did not leave them long in suspense. “Your terrible Red-coats are your own selves,” he cried. “I have heard of people being frightened by their own shadow; but never, in all my born days, did I hear of any one being frightened by his own shine.”
“Now will you explain yourself?” cried one of the young ladies, her curiosity getting the better of her chagrin. All the old men and the young men were longing to know, but were too proud to ask; but the question being asked for them, they were glad enough to crowd in, and hear the answer.
“It is only this, and nothing more,” answered Chipmonk, ejecting a pine-seed from his mouth. “You are all going to have a new suit of clothes, more splendid than you ever saw in your lives,—yellow and brown and spotted, and all manner of magnificent colors, but chiefly red; and then you will be Red-coats, won't you? Wood-thrush came from north, where the tailoring began; and he saw it, and told you. It is a sign for him to be up and flying. He thought it would be his excuse for declining your invitation, instead of which you all went thrusting your heads into a bramble-bush. O my!”
“But say, Chipmonk, do you know this? Are you sure of it? It seems too good news to be true.”
“Well, all I can say is, I have lived here, man and boy, nigh on to forty months; and I know it always has happened about this time. I am young for a Chipmonk; but I was in full career long before the oldest crone among you was born; and if there is anything hereabouts that I don't know, you may take your affidavit it isn't worth knowing.” And he sat back, and betook himself once more to his “confiscated” corn with the most indifferent superiority.