"ThorntonWBurgess-OldGrannyFox" - читать интересную книгу автора (Burgess Thornton W)

CHAPTER X: Reddy Fox Is Impudent

A saucy tongue is dangerous to possess;
Be sure some day 't will get you in a mess.
- Old Granny Fox.

Reddy Fox is headstrong and, like most headstrong people, is given
to thinking that his way is the best way just because it is his way.
He is smart, is Reddy Fox. Yes, indeed, Reddy Fox is very, very
smart. He has to be in order to live. But a great deal of what he
knows he learned from Old Granny Fox. The very best tricks he knows
she taught him. She began teaching him when he was so little that
he tumbled over his own feet. It was she who taught him how to hunt,
that it is better never to steal chickens near home but to go a long
way off for them, and how to fool Bowser the Hound.

It was Granny who taught Reddy how to use his little black nose to
follow the tracks of careless young Rabbits, and how to catch Meadow
Mice under the snow. In fact, there is little Reddy knows which he
didn't learn from wise, shrewd Old Granny Fox.

But as he grew bigger and bigger, until he was quite as big as
Granny herself, he forgot what he owed to her. He grew to have a
very good opinion of himself and to feel that he knew just about all
there was to know. So sometimes when he had done foolish or
careless things and Granny had scolded him, telling him he was big
enough and old enough to know better, he would sulk and go off
muttering to himself. But he never quite dared to be openly
disrespectful to Granny, and this, of course, was quite as it should
have been.

"If only I could catch Granny doing something foolish or careless,"
he would say to himself. But he never could, and he had begun to
think that he never would. But now at last Granny, clever Old
Granny Fox, had been careless! She had allowed Farmer Brown's boy to
catch her napping! Reddy did wish he had been there to see it himself.
But anyway, he had been told about it, and he made up his mind that
the next time Granny said anything sharp to him about his carelessness
he would have something to say back. Yes, Sir, Reddy Fox was
deliberately planning to answer back, which, as you know, is always
disrespectful to one's elders.

At last the chance came. Reddy did a thing no truly wise Fox ever
will do. He went two nights in succession to the same henhouse, and
the second time he barely escaped being shot. Old Granny Fox found
out about it. How she found out Reddy doesn't know to this day, but
find out she did, and she gave him such a scolding as even her sharp