wood trees, and for you to try to tell me that I don't know the
difference between a cherry tree and a basswood tree is going just a
little bit too far!"

"Maybe you're right!" said the hired man.

"There ain't no 'maybe' about it!" said the farmer. "I am most generally
right when it comes to understanding nature!"

"All except when you pulled up that poison ivy, barehanded!" said the
hired man, and both of them laughed, and the farmer said:

"Those basswood bobs did look so much like cherry pits, that they would
have fooled anybody but an expert!"

And the hired man said: "They looked so much like cherry pits that the
next time I am over this way, I am going to get some of them, and plant
'em in a box and raise me a cherry orchard!"

After the farmer and his hired man had gone, Mister Gabriel Chipmunk
came out from under his old home stump. Mister Chipmunk was worried. He
did not know what he was going to have to eat next winter.

So he sat on top of his old home stump and tried to think where he
could find something to put in his granary bins.

Jeremiah Yellowbird sat in a bush near by, and when he saw Mister
Chipmunk keeping so still, he said to him:

"What makes you so quiet to-day, Mister Chipmunk?"

"I am worried about what I will have to eat next winter, Mister
Yellowbird! There are no beechnuts, this year, the wild-pea crop is a
failure, the farmer has no fields of grain near my woods, and I have not
seen a groundnut for six seasons!"

"Can't you find something to take the place of those things?" asked
Mister Yellowbird.

"If the country was what it used to be, I would not worry a bit. But
every year it gets worse and worse! Why, last winter, Mrs. Chipmunk and
I had a miserable time living through the winter on wild buckwheat! My
grandfather would have starved rather than eat wild buckwheat! And he
would have starved, all right, if he had boarded at our house last
winter, for wild buckwheat was all that we had! Imagine me, the monarch
of all the woods, living on wild buckwheat!"

"Are you the monarch of the woods, Mister Chipmunk?" asked Jeremiah
Yellowbird.

"I would like to know who has a better right to be called the 'monarch
of the woods,'" said Gabriel Chipmunk. "When I sit on my old home stump
and say 'Chip! Chip! Chip!' everyone knows that I am taking care of the
woods, and if I did not keep a sharp lookout when men, and dogs, and
cats come around, there would be many lives lost! A monarc