"If he tried to deceive the
other birds, I surely would like to know about it."
"Well, he did," Mrs. Mouser Cat said emphatically, sitting bolt upright;
"but of course he doesn't like to have the story told, so I had rather
you wouldn't let him know I mentioned it.
"I don't know how he happened to get it into his head to do such a
thing, for, as a rule, he spends the most of his time over in the big
tree telling stories or making poetry; but he grew foolish once, and
whenever anybody came where he was, he said he had strange growing
feathers, and the doctor believed he was turning into a peacock.
"Of course that made a good deal of excitement around here, among all of
us, for it would be a strange thing for a crow to change in that way,
and he had twice as many visitors as he ever had before, all wanting to
know about the new feathers.
"Well, of course he couldn't keep saying that they were coming, and not
show any signs of them, so one day he said he felt terribly sick and
guessed he should go into the hospital. Then we didn't see anything of
him for most a week, until little Redder Squirrel came around and said
Mr. Crow was all right; that he had as many as six peacock feathers
growing right out of his tail.
"Well, now, you can believe we were astonished, and more excited over it
than we had been since young Mr. Thomas Cat painted the canary yellow.
Of course we asked Redder Squirrel where we could see him, and he said
Mr. Crow had agreed to come out on the hill, just under the tree, that
afternoon.
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