THE BEST OF FRIENDS
In spite of his lengthened horns, Leaper the Locust hardly dared show himself while his cousins remained in the neighborhood.
But when he did venture out, not one of the hungry horde paid the slightest heed to him. They just ate and ate and ate. And Pleasant Valley soon began to take on a brown, withered look, as if fall had already come.
Kiddie Katydid soon saw that he would have to move, if Leaper's cousins lingered there much longer. And he didn't like the thought of quitting his home.
"I wouldn't mind going, if I could take Farmer Green's dooryard with me," he remarked to a long-horned gentleman who stopped to talk with him one evening. "But of course," Kiddie added with a smile, "that's out of the question."
"I quite agree with you," said the other. "In fact, I'm ready to agree to almost anything you say."
"These Short-horns are a terrible lot!" Kiddie Katydid observed.
"They are, indeed!" exclaimed the polite stranger. "I wish they'd finish their visit here and leave us in peace."
"I never want to see another Short-horn as long as I live," Kiddie Katydid declared.
"Nor I!" echoed the strange gentleman.
And Kiddie Katydid couldn't help thinking what a pleasant person the long-horned stranger was and how gentle were his manners.
"I'd like to know your name!" he cried. "It's a long time since I have met anybody so agreeable as you are."
The stranger drew nearer and lowered his voice.
"Don't you know me?" he asked.
Kiddie Katydid stared at him for a moment.
"No!" he said at length. "To be sure, you do have a familiar look, in a way. But I must say I don't recognize you."
Then the stranger spoke in a whisper:
"They used to call me 'Leaper the Locust'!"
"Go 'way!" cried Kiddie Katydid. "He was nothing but a Short-horned Grasshopper. And anyone can see with half an eye that your horns are fully as long as my own."
"They're not real horns," said the other sadly. "That is, they're real only a part of the way."
And looking more closely, Kiddie Katydid saw that what he said was true. It was, indeed, Leaper the Locust. And he was greatly changed in more ways than one.
He had lost his old, quarrelsome air; and he had become very meek and mild.
"Don't tell my cousins what I've done!" he begged Kiddie Katydid. "I don't want them to know who I am."
Kiddie assured the poor fellow that he would not betray him. He was sorry for Leaper the Locust.
"You'll be glad when your relations move on, won't you?" he said. "Then you can take those bits of grass off your horns and be yourself again."
Leaper's answer almost took Kiddie Katydid's breath away, for it was a most surprising statement.
"I'm never going to be a Short-horn again!" he declared. "I shall wear my horns long to the end of my days."
He kept his word, too. And so earnestly did he try to be like Kiddie Katydid in every way that he even attempted Kiddie's well known Katy did melody. But he never really succeeded at that. Anyone with an ear for music could tell the difference at once.
Luckily the grasshopper horde soon swept on to new fields. And a few warm rains, with sunshine sandwiched in between showers, soon turned the countryside green again. It was really Pleasant Valley once more. And on fine autumn nights Kiddie Katydid's shrill music could be heard more than ever near the farmhouse.
Leaper the Locust never could hear enough of it. He was always begging Kiddie to repeat the odd ditty about the mysterious Katy—hoping, perhaps, that sometime he might learn more about her.
But Kiddie Katydid guarded his secret too well.
THE END
