The Tale of Dickie Deer Mouse

All the four-footed folk in the neighborhood agreed that Dickie Deer Mouse was well worth knowing. Throughout Pleasant Valley there was no one else so gentle as he.

To be sure, Jasper Jay wore beautiful--perhaps even gaudy--clothes; but his manners were so shocking that nobody would ever call him a gentleman.

As for Dickie Deer Mouse, he was always tastefully dressed in fawn color and white. And except sometimes in the spring, when he needed a new coat, he was a real joy to see. For he both looked and acted like a well-bred little person.

It is too bad that there were certain reasons--which will appear later--why some of his feathered neighbors did not like him. But even they had to admit that Dickie was a spick-and-span young chap.

Wherever he was white he was white as snow. And many of the wild people wondered how he could scamper so fast through the woods and always keep his white feet spotless.

Possibly it was because his mother had taught him the way when he was young; for his feet--and the under side of him--were white even when he was just a tiny fellow, so young that the top side of him was gray instead of fawn colored.

How his small white feet would twinkle as he frisked about in the shadows of the woods and ran like a squirrel through the trees! And how his sharp little cries would break the wood-silence as he called to his friends in a brisk chatter, which sounded like that of the squirrels, only ever so far away!

In many other ways Dickie Deer Mouse was like Frisky Squirrel himself. Dickie's idea of what a good home ought to be was much the same as Frisky's: they both thought that the deserted nest of one of the big Crow family made as fine a house as any one could want. And they couldn't imagine that any food could possibly be better than nuts, berries and grain.

To be sure, Dickie Deer Mouse liked his nuts to have thin shells. But that was because he was smaller than Frisky; so of course his jaws and teeth were not so strong.

Then, too, Dickie Deer Mouse had a trick of gathering good things to eat, which he hid away in some safe place, so that he would not have to go hungry during the winter, when the snow lay deep upon the ground. And even Frisky Squirrel was no spryer at carrying beechnuts--or any other goody--to his secret cupboard than little white-footed Dickie Deer Mouse.

It was no wonder that Dickie could be cheerful right in the dead of winter, when he had a fine store of the very best that the fields and forest yielded, to keep him sleek and fat and happy. So even on the coldest nights, when the icy wind whipped the tree-tops, and the cold, pale stars peeped down among the branches, Dickie scampered through the woods with his friends and had the gayest of times.

No one would have thought that he had a care in the world.

[Illustration]

[Illustration]

II

HUNTING A HOME

Warm weather was at hand. And Dickie Deer Mouse gave up frolicking with his friends for a time, because he needed to find a pleasant place in which to spend the summer.

He had his eye on a nest high in the top of a tall elm, where a certain black rascal known as old Mr. Crow had lived for a long while.

Now, Dickie had heard a bit of gossip, to the effect that the old gentleman had moved to another tree nearer to Farmer Green's cornfield. So Dickie wanted to lose no time. He was afraid that if he waited, some brisk member of the Squirrel family would settle himself in Mr. Crow's old home.