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]