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Updated: June 3, 2025
Then that too went out. The blackness was stifling, horrible. He opened his mouth to draw breath. Then the light at the man-hole appeared again, shining now no longer on the floor, but on a man's head, bristling, and with huge ears. Some one was squatting in the drain. His heart that had been racing brought up bump. "Any one there, Toadie?" came a voice through the man-hole.
A little ball of green inch-worm dropped off the bush on to Toadie Todson's back and began to measure its length over Toadie's big warts and veins. It made him feel very important to have an inch-worm all to himself to tickle his back, as important as an Egyptian Queen with a slave to tickle the sole of her foot all the hot afternoon long.
Then his master, Toadie Todson, with whom he at least had a lazy time, was killed in a sand slide. And now he spent all his days at work for Stingy, who was a very exacting master. If he so much as stopped to nibble a little from a tender green birch leaf, Stingy would fly at him and bid him go to work at once.
Since Toadie Todson's death, he spent a large part of every day looking at trees and measuring distances, so that Stingy could spin his webs in the best manner possible. All the rainbow qualities of web were spun on white birch trees. Greenie was humming over mournfully to himself the song which Mr. Tree Toad Todson had composed in memory of his cousin Toadie Todson A Lament.
"Ah!" came the windy chorus. "Him and old Toadie!" "Anyways there it be!" continued Reuben. "At noon to-day the Curlew drifted up against Seaford jetty, yards hung with her own crew, like carcasses in a butcher's shop." "Brutes!" gasped the boy. "But what's the meaning of it all?" Reuben shrugged till his oil-skins crackled. "No sayin, sir. Summat's up; summat big.
No, he would stay right there, it was too much trouble to move for anybody. The green inch-worm was very green, and went on measuring Toadie Todson's back, for it didn't understand a word the Bee and Ant had said, Suddenly, gravel, gravel, gravel, slip, slip, slip and Toadie Todson was under mountains of sand with a great big rock square on his back.
And the Cricket, although his house was out of doors under a big green oak leaf that had dropped to the ground, was busy piling up all the food he could find for Mrs. Cricky to guard while she nursed the three little Cricketses. Toadie Todson was tired to see so much going on. He wished they would all be quiet and stop hurrying around.
The spring had just come, that much Toadie Todson knew, and all these neighbors were busy putting their houses in order. Well, the Bee was stocking his honeycomb house, the Ant was putting her summer pantry into order and filling it with cookies, cream cheese, cake, and honey that her Majesty, the Queen Bee, sent over every day.
Squirm, Glummie's caterpillar brother, had been heard to say that it was so sweet about those clover blossoms that he could scarcely crawl by them; it made him faint. But every morning, just as the sun got up, Hummy came whirring along, singing so busily and sweetly, that even Toadie Todson stuck his head out of his mudhole to listen, and the Frisky Frog on the water's edge stopped croaking.
I wasn't going to ask my sweet lady to soil her lips on those mucky blackguards, so I kept dodging away before them, just doing enough with my dukes to keep them amused. They were no more good than a mob of cattle, you see drunk with sleep and liquor, the lot of em. "'Out knives, boys, and finish the blank! says old Toadie.
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