. They
thought of course he would know they were tired of his music and wished
he would keep still.

But such speeches only made him fiddle the faster. "An early frost!" he
would exclaim. "I must hurry if I'm to finish my summer's fiddling."

Now, Chirpy had dozens and dozens of relations living in holes of their
own, in the farmyard or the fields. And the gentlemen were all musical.
Like him, they were fiddlers. Somehow fiddling ran in their family. So on
warm nights, during the last half of the summer, there was sure to be a
Crickets' concert.

Sometimes it seemed to Johnnie Green, who lived in the farmhouse, as if
Chirpy Cricket and his relations were trying to drown the songs of the
musical Frog family, over in the swamp.

II

QUICK AND EASY

Of course Chirpy Cricket didn't spend all his time merely sitting quietly
in his hole, in the daytime--and fiddling every night. Of course he had
to eat. And each night he was in the habit of creeping out of his hole
and gathering spears of grass in Farmer Green's yard, which he carried
home with him.

He called that "doing his marketing." And it was lucky for him that he
liked grass, there was so much of it to be had. All he had to do was to
step outside his door; and there it was, all around him! It made
housekeeping an easy matter and left him plenty of time, every night, to
fiddle and frolic.

Somehow Chirpy could never go from one place to another in a slow, sober
walk. He always moved by leaps, as if he felt too gay to plod along like
Daddy Longlegs, for instance. Chirpy himself often remarked that he
hadn't time to move slowly. And almost before he had finished speaking,
as likely as not he would jump into the air and alight some distance
away. It was all done so quickly that a person could scarcely see how it
happened. But Chirpy Cricket said it was as easy as anything. And having
leaped like that, often he would begin to shuffle his wings together the
moment he landed on the ground, thereby making his shrill music.

Many of his neighbors declared that he believed a short life and a merry
one was the best kind. And when they thought of Timothy Turtle, who was
so old that nobody could even guess his age, and was so disagreeable and
snappish that every one kept out of his way, the neighbors decided that
possibly Chirpy Cricket's way was the better of the two. Anyhow, there
was no doubt that Timothy Turtle believed in a long life and a grumpy
one.

Al