The Cheerful Cricket and Others | Page 7

There's dreamland coming, dearie, And dreaming, coming, too, Sweet
dreamland for the weary, To cradle such as you.

THE NOISY FLY
Mrs. Cricky came out of her house with an angry flounce. What in the
world was all this noise about! zzz! zzz! then a thump and a bump and
the strangest little noises, more like a falsetto squeak than anything else.
This had been going on for the last minute, which is a whole hour for a
cricket, and going on while she was trying to teach Chee and Chirk and
Chirp their lessons in Running and Humming. These two things, unlike
other people, they always did at the same time.
Mrs. Cricky came out with an angry little flounce, as I said, onto the
piazza of Grass Cottage. She had been fearfully disturbed, but the
instant she saw the Noisy Fly she broke into chirping merriment. The
Noisy Fly had evidently been to last evening's concert and was trying to
imitate Miss K. T. Did in the Fire-Fly Dance. He was whisking around
at a great rate, his long legs looking very spindly under his fat black
body. But what amused Mrs. Cricky most was the way, in trying to do
the wing step, his legs got tangled up for all the world as if they were
on sticky fly paper. Of course, he fell over, and that accounted for the
bumping and the buzzing. But each time he got up and went at it again
as if nothing had happened, singing in his high falsetto voice the tune
Miss Glo-Worm had sung, which was a little Moonbeam Song,--to find
out what a Moonbeam Song is you must look long at the sky.
Moonbeam Song
Not too fast Moonbeams weave, About this place, Fairies leave No
Fairy trace.
Weave him in And weave him out, Spin it thin And round about.

Ding-dong, ding-dong, ding
See our spell Can hold him fast. Tinkle bell The hour is past.
It was not very polite for Mrs. Cricky to laugh, but really she could not
help it. Never did she see such a buzzing, clumsy attempt at imitation
as this. By this time the Noisy Fly had spied Mrs. Cricky, and his
popping black eyes scanned her anxiously, for he was accustomed to be
driven off wherever he went. Mrs. Cricky remembered the interrupted
lessons and spoke severely to him:
"Well, Noisy! here again. You are always disturbing somebody. You
are just like some other folks who never know when they are not
wanted. Noisy people are always a nuisance. You are about, before
respectable crickets have a chance to go to sleep. Buzz, Buzz, Buzz! so
that there is no sleeping after that. Your noisy wings are worse than
Toadie Todson's heavy feet, when he used to come hopping onto the
piazza after the folks were asleep. And what is more, you're not much
cleaner." By this time Mrs. Cricky had worked herself into a state of
"righteous indignation," and concluded all she had to say with a sharp,
"Be off."
Off went Noisy in a great flurry and skurry; he fairly dropped from the
roof of the piazza, where he had been hanging upside down, in his haste
to let go and get away. When Mrs. Cricky went back into the school
room she found that Chirp had upset his brown Grasshopper writing
ink all over the floor and was wiping it up with his little wing and
smearing it onto Chee. Now this ink was expensive, and could be
bought only from the Grasshopper who manufactured it himself. She
looked at Chirp just one second and told him to bring the Timothy
Grass rod hanging in the corner. Chirp knew what that meant, but he
took his punishment bravely.
When Mrs. Cricky had finished, she dropped the rod on the floor with a
sigh and gathered Chirp into her wings: "O! Chirpie, Chirpie, why will
you be such a naughty little cricket and make me punish you?" Then
Mother Cricky gave them a little talk about Noisy, and told them there
were two things they must always remember to be: Clean, and quiet

when it was proper to be quiet. After this she gave them some Red
Clover Honey and sent them out to play.

THE DIZZY MOTH
Dizzy batted up against the window, striking his head and wings with a
hard rattle. Mother Moth, like a good mother, had told Dizzy time and
time again never to fly toward a light. Dizzy had already had some
experience with odd lights hung up on poles among the oak-trees.
These lights had hoods over them, hard and white. Dizzy often
wondered why the white hoods were not as soft as the oak-buds,
notwithstanding the fact that his mother as