(To be continued.)
[THE FOX AND THE TURKEYS;
OR, CHARLEY AND THE OLD FOLKS.]
By Susan Coolidge.
[A cunning fox perceived some turkeys roosting securely on the bough of a high tree. Unable to climb, he resolved to get at them in another way. Night after night he stationed himself beneath the tree, and there played off all sorts of curious tricks. He jumped, he capered, he turned somersaults, he walked on his hind legs, he pretended to be dead, he raised and expanded his tail until, in the moonlight, it looked like a flame of fire,—in short, he performed every antic conceivable. The turkeys, who, to sleep in safety, had only to turn their backs and forget the fox, were so agitated and excited by his pranks that for whole nights they never closed their eyes; the consequence was that they lost strength, and one by one dropped from the bough and into the jaws of Renard, who soon made an end of them.
Moral.—It is unwise to concern one's self with the tricks and antics of mischievous persons.—La Fontaine's Fables.]
It was midsummer at the old Brush Farm. When I say "midsummer," how many pretty things it means,—woods at their freshest and greenest, meadows sweet with newly cut hay, cinnamon-roses in the hedges and water-lilies in the ponds, bees buzzing in and out of the clove-pinks and larkspurs which edge the beds of cabbages and carrots in the kitchen-garden, a humming-bird at work in the scarlet trumpets of the honeysuckle on the porch,—everywhere the sense of fullness and growth, with no shadow as yet of rankness or decay. August is over-ripe. September's smile is sad, but midsummer is all rosy hope, the crown and blossom of the year.
Charley Brush lay under an apple-tree, face downward, and absorbed in "The Red Rover," a book he had read at least ten times before. Stories about ships and sea-life and freebooters and buccaneers were his favorite reading, and, unfortunately, what with illustrated papers and cheap novels, and so-called "Boys' books," plenty of such tales abound nowadays. I say unfortunately, for beside teaching him nothing, these books made Charley utterly dissatisfied with his life at home. Hoeing vegetables, chopping wood, and going to the district school, seemed dull work indeed to a boy who was longing to stand sword in hand on a blood-stained deck, in a gory uniform trimmed with skulls and cross-bones, and order his enemies to be thrown one by one into the sea. "The shark awaits your car-casses!" spouted the imaginary desperado with a vicious snap of his teeth; and when Aunt Greg interrupted by asking him to bring in an armful of kindling, he glared at her like the Red Rover himself. Poor Aunt Greg! how little she guessed what was passing in his mind!