Of course Chirpy Cricket didn't spend all his time merely sitting quietly
in his hole, in the daytime--and fiddling every night. Of course he had
to eat. And each night he was in the habit of creeping out of his hole
and gathering spears of grass in Farmer Green's yard, which he carried
home with him.
He called that "doing his marketing." And it was lucky for him that he
liked grass, there was so much of it to be had. All he had to do was to
step outside his door; and there it was, all around him! It made
housekeeping an easy matter and left him plenty of time, every night, to
fiddle and frolic.
Somehow Chirpy could never go from one place to another in a slow, sober
walk. He always moved by leaps, as if he felt too gay to plod along like
Daddy Longlegs, for instance. Chirpy himself often remarked that he
hadn't time to move slowly. And almost before he had finished speaking,
as likely as not he would jump into the air and alight some distance
away. It was all done so quickly that a person could scarcely see how it
happened. But Chirpy Cricket said it was as easy as anything. And having
leaped like that, often he would begin to shuffle his wings together the
moment he landed on the ground, thereby making his shrill music.
Many of his neighbors declared that he believed a short life and a merry
one was the best kind. And when they thought of Timothy Turtle, who was
so old that nobody could even guess his age, and was so disagreeable and
snappish that every one kept out of his way, the neighbors decided that
possibly Chirpy Cricket's way was the better of the two. Anyhow, there
was no doubt that Timothy Turtle believed in a long life and a grumpy
one.
All Chirpy's relations were of the same mind as he. They acted as if they
would rather make the nights ring with their music than do anything else.
And Johnnie Green said one evening, when he heard Solomon Owl hooting
over in the hemlock woods, that it was lucky there weren't as many Owls
as there were Crickets in the valley.
If there were hundreds--or maybe thousands--of Owls, and they all hooted
at the same time, there'd be no sleeping for anybody. At least that was
Johnnie Green's opinion. And it does seem a reasonable one.
Chirpy Cricket's nearest relations all looked exactly like him. Everybody
said that the Crickets bore a strong family resemblance to one another.
But there were others--more distant cousins--that were quite unlike
Chirpy. There were the Mole Crickets, who stayed in the ground and never,
never came to the surface; and there were the Tree Crickets, who lived in
the trees and fiddled _re-teat! re-teat re-teat!_ until you might have
thought they would get tired of their ditty.
But they never did. They seemed to like their music as much as Chirpy
Cricket liked his _cr-r-r-i! cr-r-r-i! cr-r-r-i!_