Among the Night People | Page 7

had ever come to the barrel he might have
found this out, but they never did. He sneaked off by himself until he
met an early bird and thenÑwell, you know birds must eat something,
and the Mosquito was right there. Of course, after that, his brothers and

sisters had a chance to do as they wanted to, and the eleven sisters bit
thirteen people the very next night and had the loveliest kind of
Mosquito time.
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THE NAUGHTY RACCOON CHILDREN
THERE was hardly a night of his life when the Little Brother of the
raccoon family was not reproved by his mother for teasing. Mrs.
Raccoon said she didn't know what she had done to deserve such a
child. When she spoke like this to her neighbors they sighed and said,
"It must be trying, but he may outgrow it."
The Oldest Wolverene, though, told the Skunk that his cousin, Mrs.
Raccoon's husband, had been just as bad as that when he was young. "I
do not want you to say that I said so," he whispered, "because he might
hear of it and be angry, but it is true." The Oldest Wolverene didn't say
whether Mr. Raccoon outgrew this bad habit, yet it would seem that his
wife had never noticed it.
You must not think that Mr. Raccoon was dead. Oh, no, indeed! Every
night he was prowling through the forest on tiptoe looking for food.
But Mrs. Raccoon was a very devoted mother and gave so much time
and attention to her children that she was not good company for her
husband. He did not care much for home life, and the children annoyed
him exceedingly, so he went away and found a hole in another tree
which he fitted up for himself. There he slept through the day and until
the setting of the sun told him that it was time for his breakfast.
Raccoons like company, and he often had friends in to sleep with him.
Sometimes these friends were Raccoons like himself with wives and
children, and then they would talk about their families and tell how
they thought their wives were spoiling the children.

The four little Raccoons, who lived with their mother in the dead
branch of the big oak-tree, had been born in April, when the forest was
sweet with the scent of wild violets and every one was happy. Beautiful
pink and white trilliums raised their three-cornered flowers above their
threefold leaves and nodded with every passing breeze. Yellow
adder's-tongue was there, with cranesbill geraniums, squirrel-corn, and
spring beauties, besides hepaticas and windflowers and the dainty
bishop's-cap. The young Raccoons did not see these things, for their
eyes would not work well by daylight, and when, after dark, their
mother let them put their heads out of the hole and look around, they
were too far from the ground to see the flowers sleeping in the dusk
below. They could only sniff, sniff, sniff with their sharp little
turned-up noses, and wonder what flowers look like, any way.
When their mother was with them for a time, and that was while they
were drinking the warm milk that she always carried for them, she told
them stories of the flowers and trees. She had begun by telling them
animal stories, but she found that it made them cowardly. "Just
supposing," one young Raccoon had said, "a great big, dreadful Snail
should come up this tree and eat us all!"
The mother told them that Snails were small and slow and weak, and
never climbed trees or ate people, but it did no good, and her children
were always afraid of Snails until they had seen one for themselves.
After that she told them stories of the flowers, and when they asked if
the flowers would ever come to see them, she said, "No, indeed!" You
will never see them until you can climb down the tree and walk among
them, for they grow with their feet in the ground and never go
anywhere." There were many stories which they wanted over and over
again, but the one they liked best of all was that about the wicked,
wicked Poison Ivy and the gentle Spotted Touch-me-not who grew near
him and undid all the trouble that the Ivy made.
When the night came for the young Raccoons to climb down from their
tree and learn to hunt, all the early spring blossoms were gone, and
only the ripening seed-vessels showed where nodding flowers had been.
You would have expected the Raccoon children to be disappointed, yet

there were so many other things to see and learn about that it was not
until three nights later that they thought much about the flowers. They
might not have done so then if