THE LITTLE RED HEN ***
Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Sankar Viswanathan, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
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THE LITTLE RED HEN
An Old English
Folk Tale
Retold
and
Illustrated
by
FLORENCE WHITE WILLIAMS
The
SAALFIELD PUBLISHING COMPANY
CHICAGO - AKRON, OHIO - NEW YORK
PRINTED IN U. S. A.
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COPYRIGHT, 1918
BY
THE SAALFIELD PUBLISHING COMPANY
* * * * *
The Little Red Hen
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A Little Red Hen lived in a barnyard. She spent almost all of her time walking about the barnyard in her picketty-pecketty fashion, scratching everywhere for worms.
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She dearly loved fat, delicious worms and felt they were absolutely necessary to the health of her children. As often as she found a worm she would call "Chuck-chuck-chuck!" to her chickies.
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When they were gathered about her, she would distribute choice morsels of her tid-bit. A busy little body was she!
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A cat usually napped lazily in the barn door, not even bothering herself to scare the rat who ran here and there as he pleased. And as for the pig who lived in the sty--he did not care what happened so long as he could eat and grow fat.
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One day the Little Red Hen found a Seed. It was a Wheat Seed, but the Little Red Hen was so accustomed to bugs and worms that she supposed this to be some new and perhaps very delicious kind of meat. She bit it gently and found that it resembled a worm in no way whatsoever as to taste although because it was long and slender, a Little Red Hen might easily be fooled by its appearance.
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Carrying it about, she made many inquiries as to what it might be. She found it was a Wheat Seed and that, if planted, it would grow up and when ripe it could be made into flour and then into bread.
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When she discovered that, she knew it ought to be planted. She was so busy hunting food for herself and her family that, naturally, she thought she ought not to take time to plant it.
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So she thought of the Pig--upon whom time must hang heavily and of the Cat who had nothing to do, and of the great fat Rat with his idle hours, and she called loudly:
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"Who will plant the Seed?"
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