her
lips.

Then came the loud blast that Jasper knew so well. He was so startled
that he almost fell off the fence. But he was not frightened.

He was very angry, however. For Mr. Crow and his friends began to jeer
at him.

"Fly at her!" cried Mr. Crow. "She's the bird that you're going to drive
out of Pleasant Valley. And we all want to see you do it."

It was very uncomfortable for Jasper Jay. He had mistaken the sound of
the dinner-horn for the call of a strange bird. And he felt uncommonly
foolish.

Since he dared not attack Mr. Crow, especially when his ten relations
were with him, there was nothing Jasper could do except give a loud,
helpless scream of rage and hurry away toward the woods.

"See those crows chasing that blue jay!" Farmer Green said to Johnnie,
as they walked toward home. "Probably he's played some trick on them."

But for once it was not Jasper who was guilty. It was old Mr. Crow
himself who had played the trick. He had known from the first that Mrs.
Green had bought a new dinner-horn, because the men were always late for
dinner. Though how he discovered that fact is a mystery.

Somehow, old Mr. Crow knew about everything that happened in Pleasant
Valley. And now Jasper Jay had learned something more, too.

VII

SCARING THE HENS

THERE was one sport of which Jasper Jay was over-fond. He loved to
imitate the calls of other birds; and Jasper was such a good mimic that
he often deceived his neighbors by his tricks.

It was not pleasant for a sober, elderly bird-gentleman to come home at
night from a hard day's work and have his wife accuse him of idling away
his time.

"You can't deny it--for I could hear you laughing in the woods!" she
might say.

And it was not always an easy task to convince her that what she had
heard was nobody but that noisy rascal, Jasper Jay, playing a trick on
her.

Nor did Jasper limit his droll teasing to his own neighbors. Sometimes
he hid in a tree near the farm buildings and frightened the hens by
making a sound exactly like a certain red-shouldered hawk, who lived in
the low woods along Black Creek, where frogs were plentiful. A fierce
scream of "_Kee-you! kee-you!_" was quite enough to alarm an old hen
with a big family of young chickens. Though she might know well enough
that the red-shouldered hawk seldom made a meal of poultry, preferring
frogs and field-mice above all other food, it was only natural that she
shouldn't care to take any