"Dances are but the vanity of this world," moaned a sedate matron; "but woe for my dear pet Aphides, with their six hundred thousand children, who will be dead before they are born!" "Bother your six hundred thousand children!" growled a crusty philosopher. "If they _are_ dead, it is the only good thing ever I heard about them. It might be worth while to have one's country crashing about one's ears occasionally, for the sake of being well rid of such trash. Here are all our laboratories broken up, and the sun's occupation gone, and you making a to-do about a parcel of babies!" "O the sweet sunshine!" wept a poet, but most musically,--"the warm, delicious sunshine, that our hungry souls can feed upon no more, nor ever fill our drinking-cups with nectared dew!" And so in Mapleton and Sumachford and through all Leafland was nothing heard but the voice of lamentation, and nothing seen but floods of tears, and nothing thought of but how to avert or escape the threatened calamity; and, in their terror and trouble, the Leaflanders almost lost their fine tempers, and were often on the brink of quarrelling; and the people walking in Netherworld met each other under blue cotton umbrellas, and exclaimed, "What a spell of weather!" and altogether it was very uncomfortable, both in Leafland and Netherworld. Just at this time a gay young Chipmonk appeared upon the scene,--a careless, dashing, saucy fellow, very popular among the young Leaflanders of the rapid sort. He came skipping and frisking into Nutham, as his manner was, both pockets full of corn which he had _confiscated_, he remarked significantly, from a field down yonder. He nodded jauntily right and left, and then disposed himself comfortably in a corner, and began cracking his dainties in a very free-and-easy manner, not noticing the woe-begone aspect of his friends. All at once, however, he awoke to a realizing sense of things, and showed his sympathy after his own fashion, by giving a sudden flirt with his tail, and calling out, irreverently, "What's the row?" Amid tears and sighs, the sad story was related to him, in all its length and breadth and thickness; but, instead of the answering tear and sigh which his auditors expected, he only thrust his paws into his pockets, and whisked his tail over his back in frantic convulsions of laughter; muttering, as breath came to him in the pauses, "O, what a gony! For that matter, O, what a pack of gonies!"