The Tale of Old Mr. Crow

V

A GREAT DIS­AP­POINT­MENT

Af­ter Farmer Green came so near shoot­ing him, Mr. Crow lost his taste for corn for a whole year. He was afraid it would nev­er come back to him. And he wor­ried so much that he grew quite thin and his feath­ers be­gan to look rusty. His friends were some­what alarmed about his health, many of them say­ing that if they were in Mr. Crow's place they would be care­ful.

Now, strange as it may seem, that was ex­act­ly Mr. Crow's trou­ble. He was too care­ful! He was al­ways on the look­out for a gun, or a trap. And be­ing con­stant­ly on guard was bad for his nerves.

Luck­ily, a win­ter spent in the South did a great deal to im­prove Mr. Crow's health, as well as his state of mind. When he came back to Pleas­ant Val­ley the fol­low­ing March he told his cousin Jasper Jay that he re­al­ly felt he would be able to eat corn again.

As the spring length­ened, that feel­ing grew up­on Mr. Crow. And when plant­ing-​time ar­rived the black ras­cal had his old look again.

It was a very solemn look--un­less you re­gard­ed him close­ly. But it was a very sly, know­ing look if you took the pains to stare bold­ly in­to his eye.

Farmer Green would have liked to do that, be­cause then he might have caught old Mr. Crow. As it hap­pened, he did _catch sight_ of Mr. Crow the very first day he be­gan to plant his corn.

“I de­clare--there's that old crow again!” he ex­claimed. “He's come back to both­er me once more. But maybe I'm smarter than he thinks!”

Mr. Crow knew bet­ter than to come too near the men who were work­ing in the corn­field. He just sat on the fence on the fur­ther side of the road and watched them for a while. And he was get­ting hun­gri­er ev­ery minute. But he had no chance to scratch up any corn that day.

The next day, how­ev­er, the men had moved fur­ther down the field. Mr. Crow had been wait­ing for that. He flew to the edge of the ploughed ground, which they had plant­ed the af­ter­noon be­fore, and dug up a ker­nel of corn.

He didn't stop to look at it. He knew it was corn--just by the feel­ing of it. And it was in­side his mouth in a twin­kling.

And in an­oth­er twin­kling it was out­side again--for Mr. Crow did not like the taste at all.

“That's a bad one!” he re­marked. And then he tried an­oth­er ker­nel--and an­oth­er--and an­oth­er. But they were all like the first one.

There­upon, Mr. Crow paused and looked at the corn. And he saw at once that there was some­thing wrong. The ker­nels were gray, in­stead of a gold­en yel­low. He pecked at one of them and found that the gray coat­ing hid some­thing black and sticky.

That was tar, though Mr. Crow did not know it. And the gray cov­er­ing was wood-​ash­es, in which Farmer Green had rolled the corn af­ter dip­ping it in tar. The tar made the corn taste bad. And the wood-​ash­es kept it from stick­ing to one's fin­gers.

“This is a great dis­ap­point­ment,” said Mr. Crow very solemn­ly. “Of all the mean tricks that Farmer Green has played on me, this is by far the mean­est. It would serve him right if I went away and nev­er caught a sin­gle grasshop­per or cut­worm all sum­mer.”

But there were two rea­sons that pre­vent­ed Mr. Crow's leav­ing Pleas­ant Val­ley. He liked his old home. And he liked grasshop­pers and cut­worms, too. So he stayed un­til Oc­to­ber. And the strange part of it was that he nev­er once dis­cov­ered that Farmer Green had plant­ed tarred corn on­ly in a bor­der around the field. In­side that bor­der the corn was of the good, old yel­low kind that Mr. Crow liked.

And so, for once, Farmer Green out-​wit­ted old Mr. Crow.

By the end of the sum­mer his corn had grown so tall and borne so many big ears that Farmer Green took some of it to the coun­ty fair. And ev­ery­body who saw it there said that it was the finest corn that ev­er was seen in those parts.