VII. Mr. Crow's Bad Memory - Page 2

would take the bandage off his foot and look at it. He had some trouble in removing the bandage. And when he had succeeded in unwinding it he could hardly believe his eyes. His foot was its natural size again!

Old Mr. Crow looked at the bandage. And he saw, clinging to it, a mass of caked mud. He could not understand that.

"Anyhow, I'm cured," he said sadly. He was disappointed, because there were still a good many of his friends to whom he had not yet shown his bandaged foot. "I don't consider that Aunt Polly Woodchuck is as good a doctor as people say," Mr. Crow grumbled. "Here she's gone and cured my foot almost a week before I wanted her to!"

And the next day he went over to see the old lady and complain about her mistake.

"What have you been eating?" she asked Mr. Crow.

He told her.

"Ah!" said Aunt Polly. "It's your mistake--and not mine. You ate what was in your left-hand pocket, instead of what was in the right-hand one. If you had followed my instructions everything would have been all right."

Old Mr. Crow felt very much ashamed. There was nothing he could say. So he slunk away and moped for three days.

Though he did not know it, the trouble with his foot was simply this: He had daubed so much tar on his foot, in Farmer Green's cornfield, that the soft earth had stuck to it in a big ball.

Mr. Crow recovered his spirits at last. And neither he nor Aunt Polly Woodchuck ever discovered that he never had gout at all. He forgave her, at last, for having cured his foot too quickly, for the affair gave him something to talk about for a long time afterward. He never tired of telling his friends about the trouble he had had.

But many of the feathered folk in Pleasant Valley grew very weary of the tale before they heard the last of it.