GRASSHOPPER GREEN

Dominion, Volume 22, Issue 140, 9 March 1929, Page 24

GRASSHOPPER GREEN

Grasshopper Green was a merry fellow. He was also the gentlest, greenest, jumpiest grasshopper that was ever seen, heard of, or merely invented. His greatest wish was to jump over the moon, and folks said that he might easily have done it if he had tried, but he always said: “I will do it some day,” but he never did. Perhaps he was too busy, for he jumped at all the insect garden parties and everybody liked him. Handsome, too, so that, as he sat on a grass-stem stroking his whiskers with his forefoot, many an insect maiden heart went out to him. But Grasshopper Green didn’t care about maidens. He had no time for them. His jumping took up most of the day, and in the evenings he sang in the crickets’ choir in the shade of pink-tipped daisies. Music and jumping were the whole world to Grasshopper Green, so it is no wonder that he did not jump over the moon. But a more glorious deed awaited him. Listen to this! Time went on sweetly and smoothly —so smoothly that he did not notice it,' and soon he was forty. And when he thought, he realised that he was getting a little stiff in the joints, that his leaps were not nearly so high as they had been; that his chirruping was a little hoarse now, and that his dress was just a little faded and threadbare, as people and dresses do get stiff and faded after forty.

He turned his dimming eyes to the sky. That golden orange of a moon had never seemed so far away. Then one day, as he was exercising on the lawn near the rose-beds, he saw a vision, a tiny babe lying in its princely cot of satin and lace. In the shade of the wall the babe lay, smiling. Bare, chubby legs, bare rounded arms, lay outside the coverlet, limbs made of rose leaves rather than of flesh. At the next moment, tragedy crept stealthily on the scene. From a dark erevise in the wall, there dropped upon the snowy coverlet a small black shape, a scorpion insect of witches and wickedness. The tiny child’s dimpled foot- lay outside the edge of her cot, and on to it, to the grasshopper’s horror, the scorpion climbed. The baby stirred; the scorpion raised its poisoned tail. To Grasshopper Green,' even in his youth, the height would have been great, but now, at forty! Now his joints were stiff, his muscles were spent, but love and horror swelled in his heart. An enormous effort he made, and leapt as if for the moon. Just high enough, he reached, to land upon the scorpion, and as the two of them fell to earth again, the wicked sting flashed out and pierced the green sides of the grasshopper. The baby was safe again, but in the garden, a small green body lay lifeless and almost hidden with grass. Grasshopper Green was truly a noble fellow.— P.M.F.