Mother West Wind "Where" StoriesBurgess, Thornton W. (Thornton Waldo)
General
Mother West Wind "Where" Stories
Burgess, Thornton W. (Thornton Waldo)
Animals -- Juvenile fiction
"Chug-a-rum!" began Grandfather Frog. You know he always begins a story
that way. "Chug-a-rum! Once upon a time the Great World was mostly
water, and most of the people lived in the water. It was in those days
that my great-great-ever-so-great-grandfather lived. Those were happy
days for the Frogs. Yes, indeed, those were happy days for the Frogs. Of
course they had enemies, but those enemies were all in the water. They
didn't have to be watching out for danger from the air and from the
land, as I do now. There was plenty to eat and little to do, and the
Frog tribe increased very fast. In fact, the Frogs increased so fast
that after a while there wasn't plenty to eat. That is, there wasn't
plenty of the kind of food they had been used to, which was mostly water
plants, and water bugs and such things.
"Of course there were many fish, and these also increased very fast,
and the big fish ate the Frogs whenever they could catch them, just as
they do to this day. The big fish also ate the little fish, and it
wasn't long before the Frogs and the little fish took to living where
the water was not deep enough for the big fish to swim, and this made it
all the harder to get enough to eat. The mouths of the Frogs in those
days were not big. In fact, they were quite small. You see, living on
the kind of food they did, they had no need of big mouths.
"One day as a Great-great-ever-so-great-grandfather Frog sat with just
his head out of water, wondering what it would seem like to have his
stomach really filled, a school of little fish came swimming about him,
and it popped into his head that if little fish were good for big fish
to eat, they might be good for a Frog to eat. So he caught the first
one that came within reach, and he found it was good to eat. He liked it
so well that after that he caught fish whenever he could. Of course he
swallowed them whole. He had to, because he had no chewing or biting
teeth.
"Now the Frogs always have been famous for their appetites, and
Great-grandfather Frog found that it took a great many of these teeny
weeny fish to make a comfortable meal. He was thinking of this one day
when a larger fish came within reach, and almost without realizing what
he was doing Great-grandfather snapped at and caught him. He caught the
fish by the tail and at once began to swallow it, which, of course, was
no way to swallow a fish. But Great-grandfather Frog had much to learn
in those day, and so he tried to swallow that fish tail first instead
of head first. He got the tail down and the smallest part of the body,
and then that fish stuck. Yes, Sir, that fish stuck. The fact was,
Great-grandfather Frog's mouth wasn't wide enough. It was bad enough not
to be able to swallow all of that fish, but what was worse was the
discovery that he couldn't get up again what he had swallowed. That fish
was stuck! It would go neither down nor up.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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