Chapter 4

RUSTY WREN HELPS



RUSTY WREN'S wife was getting very impatient. She was at home with her fast-growing family of youngsters, at home in the cherry tree near Farmer Green's chamber window.

"Dear me!" Mrs. Wren exclaimed. "I don't see what's keeping Rusty. It's at least a quarter of an hour since he brought any food to these children."

Mrs. Wren soon grew tired of waiting.

"I'll go and find him!" she said under her breath. And telling her nestlings that she would be back in a few minutes, she hurried off towards the orchard.

"I thought so!" Mrs. Wren muttered soon afterward, as she caught sight of her husband. He was talking with Jolly Robin, in the old apple tree where the Robin family lived. "I thought so!"

"Have you forgotten your duty as a parent?" Mrs. Wren asked her husband in a tart voice, dropping down on a branch right behind him.

Rusty Wren jumped.

"I've been here only a second or two," he faltered. "Mr. Robin and I had a little business together."

"So I see," said Mrs. Wren. "So I see. And now, if your business is finished, allow me to remind you that you have six hungry sons and daughters at home." Then Mrs. Wren twitched herself off her perch and flew back to the cherry tree and her family.

"I declare," Rusty Wren remarked to his friend Jolly Robin, "I must have stayed here, talking with you, longer than I thought. Those children have enormous appetites. I'll have to work more spryly than ever to get them fed before sunset."

"I know how that is," said Jolly Robin with a chuckle. Somehow he seemed much more cheerful than his companion. "I was actually glad when our last nestlings were big enough to leave home and hustle for themselves. But, of course," he added, "I still keep an eye on them."

Rusty Wren had already begun to hunt for tidbits. Almost immediately he found an ant, which he snatched up and carried away. Back and forth he flew, making dozens of trips between his house and the orchard. Grubs and caterpillars, grasshoppers and spiders--he seized them wherever he could spy them and took them home to his famishing children.

Though he worked his hardest, Mrs. Wren hadn't a smile for him. And when she said anything in his hearing, it was some such remark as this: "You poor, hungry dears! It's a pity you can't have all you need to eat. I only hope your scanty meals won't stunt your growth."

Naturally such speeches didn't make her husband feel any more at his ease.

"I'll have to bring home something special, to please her," he thought. "I wish I could find some dainty that would put her in better humor."

So he looked all around to see what he could discover that