Part 7 (2/2)

”I'll do so,” Kiddie Katydid promised. ”And now let me give you a bit of advice. When you meet Mr. Nighthawk, keep perfectly still. He's a hungry fellow, always on the look-out for somebody to eat. But he has one peculiar habit: he won't grab you unless you're moving through the air.

He always takes his food on the wing.”

Chirpy thanked his friend Kiddie Katydid for this valuable bit of news.

And he said he'd be sure to remember it.

”Well,” Kiddie Katydid observed, ”if you forget it when you meet Mr.

Nighthawk you'll forget it only once. For he'll grab you quick as a flash.”

Chirpy Cricket pondered a good deal over the talk he had with Kiddie Katydid. It was clear that Mr. Nighthawk was a dangerous person.

”Perhaps”--Chirpy thought--”perhaps if I could get him to take a greater interest in his music he wouldn't be so ferocious. Yes! I feel sure that if I could only persuade him to practice that booming sound it would give Mr. Nighthawk something pleasant to think of. Who knows but that he might become as gentle as I am?”

Chirpy Cricket liked that notion so much that he thought of little else.

He even began to consider making a journey to the woods where Mr.

Nighthawk lived, in order to meet that gentleman and offer to train him to be a better musician. And at last Chirpy had even decided to go--as soon as the moon should be full. He spent much of his time listening for Mr. Nighthawk's _Peent! Peent!_ which now and then came faintly across the meadow, and the dull, m.u.f.fled _boom_ that often followed.

While Chirpy waited for the moon to grow full, one night an odd thing happened. The stars twinkled overhead. There wasn't a cloud in the sky.

Yet all at once a loud _boom_ startled Chirpy Cricket and made him leap suddenly towards home.

”Goodness!” he cried to Kiddie Katydid, who happened to be near him. ”Did you hear the thunder?”

”That wasn't thunder,” Kiddie said. ”And you'd better not jump like that again. Mr. Nighthawk is here. He made that sound himself.”

XX

BOUND TO BE DIFFERENT

Nothing ever surprised Chirpy Cricket more than what Kiddie Katydid told him. He had thought it was thunder that he had just heard. But it was Mr.

Nighthawk, making that odd, booming sound of his. It was ever so much louder than Chirpy had supposed it could be. He had never heard it so near before.

For a moment Chirpy thought that perhaps Kiddie Katydid didn't know what he was talking about. But no! There was Mr. Nighthawk's well-known call, _Peent! Peent!_ There was no denying that it was his voice. He always talked through his nose--or so it sounded. And one couldn't mistake it.

Chirpy Cricket began to think that after all he would rather not have a talk with Mr. Nighthawk. He certainly sounded terrible!

Meanwhile Mr. Nighthawk alighted in a tree right over Chirpy's head, and settled himself lengthwise along a limb. He was, indeed, an odd person.

He liked to be different from other folk. And just because other birds sat crosswise on a perch, Mr. Nighthawk had to sit in exactly the opposite fas.h.i.+on. No doubt if he could have, he would have hung underneath the limb by his heels, like Benjamin Bat. Only he would have wanted to hang by his nose instead of his heels, in order to be different.

”Has anybody seen Chirpy Cricket?” Mr. Nighthawk sang out.

”He's on the ground, under that tree you're in,” Kiddie Katydid informed him. Kiddie never moved as he spoke, but clung closely to a twig in the bush where he was hiding. Being green himself, he hardly thought that Mr.

<script>