The Tale of Dickie Deer Mouse | Page 3

didn't mean to frighten you."
Mr. Crow gave a sudden hoarse haw-haw.
"Pooh!" he cried. "You don't think I was scared, do you?"
"You called for help," Dickie reminded him.
"Certainly I did," Mr. Crow agreed. "I wanted somebody to help you out of my house, before I trampled on you and broke one of your legs--or maybe two or three of 'em."
That explanation gave Dickie Deer Mouse another surprise; for he had supposed all the time that Mr. Crow didn't know who--or what--had awakened him.
"Oh!" he cried. "I thought that you thought I was somebody else."
Mr. Crow glared at him.
"I thought that you thought that I thought----" he squalled. He was so angry that his tongue became sadly twisted; and he all but choked.
Meanwhile Dickie Deer Mouse waited respectfully until Mr. Crow had recovered his speech.
"What are you doing here at this hour?" Mr. Crow demanded at last.
"I thought----" Dickie began.
"There you go again!" the old gentleman interrupted him testily. "I didn't ask you what you thought. I asked you what you were doing."
"I'm not doing anything just now," Dickie Deer Mouse faltered.
"Yes, you are!" Mr. Crow corrected him. "You're sitting on a limb of my tree.... Get off it at once!"
So Dickie Deer Mouse moved to a more distant perch.
"Now you're sitting on another!" Mr. Crow exploded. "Get out of my tree this instant!" It always made him ill-tempered to be awakened from a sound sleep in the middle of the night.
Once more Dickie Deer Mouse asked his pardon.
"I was told," he explained, "that you had moved lately. And I did not expect to find you here."
"Ah!" said Mr. Crow. "I know now why you came sneaking into my house. You'd like to live here yourself."
"Pardon me!" Dickie Deer Mouse exclaimed with the lowest of bows. "You are mistaken, Mr. Crow. Though your house is a fine, large one, it's much too small to hold us both."
And whisking about, while Mr. Crow stared at him, he ran down the tall elm as fast as he could go.
It was clear that if Mr. Crow wasn't going to move he would have to look elsewhere for a summer home.
[Illustration]

[Illustration]
IV
THE BLACKBIRD'S NEST
For a few days after his visit to Mr. Crow's elm, Dickie Deer Mouse kept watch carefully of Mr. Crow's comings and goings. And he decided at last that the old gentleman liked his home too well to leave it.
But Dickie was not discouraged. He had no doubt that he could find some other pleasant quarters in which to spend the summer--quarters that would prove almost as airy, and perhaps more convenient--because they were not so high.
For there was no denying that Mr. Crow's nest was a long, long way from the ground.
So Dickie began to search for birds' nests. And for a time he had to suffer a great deal of scolding by his feathered neighbors. It must be confessed that they were none too fond of Dickie Deer Mouse. There was a story of something he was said to have done one time--a tale about his having driven a Robin family away from their nest, in order to live in it himself.
That seems a strange deed on the part of anyone so gentle as Dickie Deer Mouse. But old Mr. Crow always declared that it was true. And Solomon Owl often remarked that he wished Dickie Deer Mouse would try to drive him away from his home in the hollow hemlock.
[Illustration: Dickie scampered through the woods with his friends]
But during his hunt for birds' nests Dickie Deer Mouse was careful to keep away from Solomon Owl, and his cousin Simon Screecher, and all the rest of the Owl family. He contented himself with hasty peeps into nests built by such smaller folk as Blackbirds and Robins. And if it happened that anybody was living in one of those nests, Dickie soon found it out. For the angry owners were sure to fly at him with screams of rage, and peck at his head as they darted past him.
It was really not worth while getting into a fight over a bird's nest, when there was plenty of old ones in which nobody dwelt. To be sure, many of them were almost ready to fall apart. But Dickie Deer Mouse finally found one to his liking--a last year's bird's nest where two Blackbirds had reared a promising family. They had not come back to Pleasant Valley. And there was their house, almost as good as new, just waiting for some one to move in and make himself at home.
Nobody objected when Dickie took the old nest for his home, though many a bird in the neighborhood remarked in his hearing that he would hate to be too lazy to build a house for himself.
Dickie Deer Mouse was too mild and gentle-mannered to make any