Exciting Adventures of Mister Robert Robin | Page 6

very apt to boast about himself, when he is talking to
strangers!" said Mrs. Robin.
"Major Partridge is the funniest thing!" said Mrs. Partridge. "He is
desperately afraid of snakes, but when Bob White was telling about his
going to whip Mister Owl, Major Partridge threw his chest out, and
swelled himself up, and said in a very gruff voice, 'To-morrow, I think,
if the weather is good, I shall drive all of the snakes out of our woods!'"
"That must have sounded funny!" said Mrs. Robin. "But I wish that all
the snakes were driven from the woods, they are such ugly-looking
things!"
"They are so hideous!" said Mrs. Partridge.
"I must hurry back to my eggs!" said Mrs. Robin. "My babies will
begin to hatch next week!"
"I expect that my baby partridges will all be out of the shell before next
Thursday!" said Mrs. Partridge. "I do hope that the weather stays good!
Last year the weather was so cold and wet that it was very
disagreeable!"
"How many eggs are you covering, Mrs. Partridge?" asked Mrs. Robin.
"Only twelve, this year!"
"Twelve! Mercy me! Why! Mrs. Partridge! I cannot see how you will
be able to look after so many children!"
"I do not think twelve is such a large family! Last year I had fourteen,
and every one of them grew to be as big as their father," said Mrs.
Partridge.
"The largest family I ever had was five, and one of them kept falling
out of the nest!" said Mrs. Robin.
"I always take my children out of the nest as soon as they are out of the
shell! It is so much more sanitary!" said Mrs. Partridge.

"My children simply have to stay in their nest until they are ready to fly!
It is such a job to feed and care for them! They never seem to get
enough to eat!"
Just then they heard Mister Robert Robin calling. He was standing
beside the nest and saying, "Tut! Tut! Tut!--Tut! Tut! Tut!"
"Mister Robin is getting uneasy so I had better hurry home before he
does something desperate!"
Mrs. Partridge watched Mrs. Robin as she flew back to her nest in the
tall basswood tree.
"That little Mrs. Robin is a very neat sort of a little body!" she said to
herself. "I just know that she is a tidy nest keeper,--she always looks so
spick and span, herself!"
Robert Robin could hardly wait until Mrs. Robin got back to their tree.
He was in such a hurry. The moment she settled herself on the nest he
darted away across the fields, straight to where the row of cherry trees
bordered the farmer's garden.
He wanted to see if the cherries were ripe. But he was surprised to find
that the cherries were all green and hard, and were too sour to even
taste like a cherry.
"What makes the cherries so late, this year?" he thought to himself. "It
does seem to me that these trees were in bloom so many weeks ago,
that it is high time for them to be ready with their cherries!"
Robert Robin was sitting in the top of one of the farmer's cherry trees,
thinking about the cherries that ought to be ripe when he saw a cat in
the farmer's garden.
It was a big Maltese cat. It was a pretty cat, but Mister Robert Robin
could not see anything pretty about a cat, and he did not like the looks
of this one.

"I never saw this cat before!" thought Robert Robin. "The farmer must
have a new cat! I hope it is a house-cat instead of a cat that goes
prowling around the fields and woods!"
The big Maltese cat went over to the strawberry bed and lay down on
some straw. Then the farmer's wife came into the garden, and there was
a little boy with her. He was her sister's boy, and he was going to spend
the summer at the farmer's home. The boy had a tin whistle, and once
in a while he would blow upon it. The farmer's wife was thinking to
herself, "After he goes to bed to-night, I am going to hide that whistle
where he can't find it!" But she did not say a word to the little boy
about the whistle.
The little boy saw the big Maltese cat lying on the strawberry bed, and
the little boy went up close to the cat and blew his tin whistle at the cat.
The big Maltese cat did not like to hear the whistle so close to his ears;
it made his ears hurt, so he said "Meow!" and started to walk away, and
the naughty little boy laughed, and blew the whistle with all his might.