Freddy and the Bean Home News

by Walter R. Brooks

  “Extra! Extra!” shouted Freddy. “First issue of the Bean Home News! Get your copies here. Read all about the big scrap iron drive. Extra! First robin seen in the back pasture. Read all about it.”

  In two minutes he was surrounded by a crowd of animals, all eager to know what the excitement was about, and he passed out the papers as fast as he could. “All the local news, hot from the press,” he shouted. “First animal newspaper ever printed. Don’t ask questions. Read it for yourselves. Extra! Extra!”

  Then the back door opened and Mr. Bean came out on the porch. “What’s all the racket?” he demanded.

  Freddy picked up a paper in his mouth and handed it to him. Mr. Bean peered at it right side up, then he turned it upside down and peered at it, then he shouted: “Mrs. B., bring me my spectacles.”

  So Mrs. Bean brought him his spectacles, and he hooked them carefully over his ears, and then they both looked at the paper. Mr. Bean looked at the front page, then he opened it and looked at the inside, and then he looked at the back page. All the time he didn’t say anything, and the animals who hadn’t already taken their copies into the barn where they could spread them out on the dry floor, watched him in anxious silence.

  Mrs. Bean was smiling, but at times like this she never said anything until Mr. Bean had expressed an opinion. And at last he spoke. He folded up the paper in his left hand, and struck it sharply with the back of his right hand. “There’s a paper that’s got some sense to it,” he said.

  “What do you mean, Mr. B.?” asked Mrs. Bean.

  “I mean, Mrs. B.,” he replied, “there ain’t any politics in it.” He peered at Freddy over his spectacles. “Politics,” he said, “ain’t news. Remember that.” Then he fished in his pocket and drew out a dollar. “My subscription,” he said and handed it to Freddy. Then he went in to breakfast.

  Freddy, of course, was pretty pleased. And while he is being pleased let’s look at the paper ourselves.

  THE BEAN HOME NEWS

  The Animals’ Own Newspaper

  Published Once a Week by Dimsey,

  Freddy & Co.

  Price 5 cents

  Yearly subscription $1

  or what have you?

  Publisher: Wilberforce Dimsey

  Editor-in-Chief: Freddy

  Please address all communications to the firm.

  On the first page was an article about the meeting and the scrap drive, with an appeal to the animals to win the prize for the Bean farm.

  On the second page, under the heading: “Neighborhood News,” were such items as the following:

  “Our distinguished fellow citizen, Charles, who was prevented by a bad cold from delivering a patriotic address at our last meeting, is much improved.

  “Mr. Bean and Hank were in Centerboro on business Thursday. Hank says the old town doesn’t change much.

  “A surprise party for Mr. and Mrs. E. Nibble was given by a number of their squirrel friends at their residence in the oak tree in the upper pasture Wednesday evening. Guessing games were played, and a tasty supper of beechnuts was enjoyed by all.

  “Among the woods animals present at our last meeting was Peter, whom we are glad to welcome after his hibernation. He says he is out for the summer now, and will be glad to see callers here in his new den in the big woods. He is At Home on Tuesdays.

  “One of the prettiest weddings ever held on the Bean farm took place last Monday in the henhouse, when Chiquita, the eighth daughter of Charles and Henrietta, was united in marriage to Mr. J. Bantam Merrythought, a rooster from the Schermerhorn farm, over the hill. The henhouse was tastefully decorated with pink and white paper streamers, and a cold collation of cracked corn was served. The happy couple left after the ceremony for the Schermerhorn farm, where they will make their home with his parents. May their life together be a long and happy one.

  “Mr. and Mrs. Webb will move next week from their winter quarters in the Bean parlor to their summer home on the third rafter in the cow barn.”

  On the third page was an account of the arrival of the first robin. “The influx of summer visitors,” wrote Freddy, “has begun. In preparation for the spring renting season, the many attractive summer cottages maintained by Mrs. Bean in the commodious grounds of the Bean farm, have been cleaned and thoroughly renovated. We look forward to welcoming back many old friends among the bird colony, and to making many new ones among those who have never before visited us. It is a source of great pride and satisfaction to us that so many of our feathered friends return year after year, and we venture to predict that few who spend one on the Bean farm will ever care to spend a summer elsewhere.”

  He filled out the page with a poem on spring which I am sorry to say was not one of his best efforts, and so it is not printed here. But it made the page look nice.

  And then on the last page he explained how those who did not have a dollar and yet wished to subscribe for the paper, could pay for it in work, or by bringing in wild nuts and berries and so on. Subscriptions would be taken at the First Animal Bank, during banking hours (from three to four every other Tuesday afternoon), or at Freddy’s home. Any animal bringing in three subscriptions would receive one for himself free.

  After Freddy had received the compliments of the other animals on the fine appearance, and the interesting contents, of his new paper, he left them all busily reading their copies and hurried down to the pigpen, to wash his windows. He was scrubbing away with a piece of one of Mr. Bean’s old shirts when Henrietta came to the door of the henhouse.

  “Well, upon my word!” she said. “Are you sick or something, Freddy?”

  “Are you sick or something, Freddy?”

  “Editor’s got to have windows he can see through,” replied the pig. “He’s got to know what’s going on in the world, so he can write about it. Besides, if anybody comes with a subscription, I don’t want to miss them.”

  “Nobody’ll know it’s the pigpen if it has clean windows,” said Henrietta. “They’ll walk right by. Have you seen Charles around?”

  “Sure. He’s where he is every morning this time—up on the back porch, waiting for the sun to get high enough so he can see his reflection in the bottom of that frying pan Mr. Bean hung out for him to bang on.”

  “Is he up there admiring himself again?” exclaimed Henrietta. “I don’t know what I’m going to do with that rooster. He’s smart, and he’s a good husband, but he’s the conceitedest bird that ever lived. I never would have a piece of looking glass in the henhouse for the girls to fix their feathers in front of, because I knew Charles would be admiring himself in it all the time. But at least, he’d have been indoors—not strutting around in front of everybody.” She hurried off in the direction of the house.

  Pretty soon Freddy threw down the rag and went in and sat in his old armchair. “Why, it’s quite pretty—quite a nice view,” he said. “Should have washed the window long ago. But what’s that range of hills off beyond the woods? I never saw them before.” But when he got up to look more closely he saw that what he had taken for hills were just streaks of dirt that the rag had left on the pane. “Dear me,” he said, “that’s very picturesque. Quite an addition to the landscape. I guess I’ll leave it like that.” So he didn’t try to get the window any cleaner.

  For the rest of the day he was pretty busy. Animals kept coming in to arrange for subscriptions to the Bean Home News, and other animals brought pieces of iron to be weighed and added to the scrap pile, and this made a good deal of pretty complicated bookkeeping. With Mrs. Bean’s help, Freddy had worked out an ingenious scheme for weighing the iron. They had put a long plank over a sawhorse, so that it balanced just evenly. Then they had found out just what each animal weighed. A mouse weighed four ounces, a fat chipmunk, half a pound, an average rabbit, a pound and a half, and so on. When a piece of iron was brought in, they put it on one end of the seesaw, and then they would add animals to the other end until it balanced. Then they would add up animals and get weight. A piece of iron that wei
ghed three rabbits and a chipmunk, weighed just about five pounds.

  Of course most of the pieces of iron that were brought in were pretty small, because the animals that brought them in were small. But it is surprising how many nails and bits of wire and old rusty hinges and things of that kind are scattered around any old house, and when several hundred small animals start gathering them they get together a pretty imposing pile. The four mice alone brought in over a bushel basket full of old nails.

  Anyone who had visited the Bean farm during these days would have known that something unusual was going on all right. Chipmunks and field mice were darting in and out of the stone walls, and a line of rabbits, spaced a foot apart, moved across the fields, examining every inch of ground. Skunks and squirrels and raccoons come down in a steady stream from the woods, each with a bit of iron in his mouth. And every now and then one would come to report to Freddy of something too big for him to handle alone, and Freddy would send one or two of the larger animals up for it with a rope.

  One day Theodore, the frog, who lived up in the brook, came down with half a dozen rusty hairpins in his mouth.

  “Heard you were having a d-d-dud, I mean drive for iron, Freddy,” he said, “so I brought these. No use for ’em myself.” Theodore stuttered, although he really didn’t have to. He did it because he thought it gave him more time to think up what he wanted to say.

  Freddy grinned. “Had your long golden hair all cut off, eh, Theodore?” he said. “Well, I don’t know that I blame you. Must have been kind of a nuisance, doing it up under water every morning. Sure we can use these.”

  “Hairpins!” exclaimed Charles contemptuously. “Can’t build battleships out of them!”

  “You m-mean they’re too small to be of any use?” said Theodore, looking rather crestfallen.

  “Certainly not,” said Freddy, sharply. “Nothing’s too small to be of use. I don’t know what call Charles has to sound off—he hasn’t brought in anything at all yet.”

  “I have too,” said the rooster. “At least, I told you where there was a horseshoe. I guess I’m as public-spirited and patriotic as any animal on this farm. I guess—”

  “I guess you might get to work instead of standing around making speeches,” interrupted Freddy. “It might take a hundred billion hairpins to make a battleship, but it would take seven trillion of your speeches, and then they wouldn’t have built anything but the noise one of the big guns makes.—Where did you get them, Theodore?”

  “It was f-four years ago, there were a couple ladies gathering flowers and one of ’em fell in the brook. She made an awful fuss. I don’t know why—she just got wet. I found ’em afterwards and put ’em aside; thought I might need ’em some time. But I guess the country needs ’em more than I do.”

  Freddy thanked the frog, and made an entry in his book: Theodore, 6 hairpins.

  Of course some heavy things were brought in, too. Peter dragged down the old stove from the Grimby house in the woods, and Mr. Bean got two old automobiles from down on the flats, and in a little gully where the brook crossed the upper road, the animals worked two days digging in an old rubbish heap and found a sewing machine and a hot water boiler and three iron beds.

  With all this work, and with the subscriptions to his paper coming in by the dozens, Freddy had very little time to get the next week’s issue ready. So he decided that he would have to have a secretary, and went over to the Macy farm for his Cousin Ernest’s son, Little Weedly. But Weedly was away on a visit, and so his brother, Ernest, Jr., came.

  Ernest, Jr., was as nice a pig as you could find anywhere. The only trouble was that when you did find him, he was usually asleep. He couldn’t seem to keep awake, and there wasn’t any use reprimanding him for it, because right in the middle of your talking to him, he’d drop off again. Freddy didn’t get much work out of him. I guess he wouldn’t have got any if he hadn’t hired a porcupine named Cecil to stay with Ernest, Jr. and just sort of lean up against him whenever his head started to nod.

  And even Cecil wasn’t as helpful as he might have been. For one afternoon Freddy came into the bank, and there was Ernest, Jr. sound asleep with his head on the desk, and beside him was Cecil, and he was sound asleep too. Freddy was pretty mad.

  “Here, you,” he said, giving Cecil a poke, “what do you think I hire you for? Wake up!”

  Cecil opened his eyes and then jumped up. “Oh, gosh, Freddy,” he said, “I’m sorry. I don’t know what’s the matter with me. If I stay with Ernest, Jr. a little while I get so drowsy I can’t keep my eyes open. You know how it is yourself. If you’re with somebody that keeps yawning, pretty soon you begin yawning too, and if his head begins to nod, yours begins too, and your eyes go shut and there you are.”

  “There you aren’t, you mean,” said Freddy. “I guess you could keep awake if you wanted to.”

  “All right, you try it, then,” said Cecil. “If you can keep awake the rest of the afternoon, I’ll work for you for nothing the rest of the month.”

  So Cecil went out, and Freddy woke up Ernest, Jr., and everything went along nicely for a while. Several animals came in with subscriptions, and Ernest, Jr. had to go out and weigh up an old milk can that Sniffy Wilson and two other skunks had found down on the Flats, and rolled all the way up the road to the Bean farm. Freddy sat in the corner with pencil and pad scribbling away at an article for his paper. But when things quieted down, and Ernest, Jr. came back in and sat down with a yawn that almost cracked his jaw, Freddy himself began to feel unaccountably drowsy.

  It was very quiet in the bank. The only sound was the “Hi, ho, yaw!” of Ernest, Jr. yawning, and the only thing that moved was Ernest, Jr.’s head, drooping, drooping, nodding towards the desk in front of him. Freddy got up, walked over to him, and poked him awake.

  “Ho—hoooo,” yawned Ernest, Jr. and smiled sleepily. “’Fraid I was getting wee mite—hoo-yaw!—dozy. Very comf’ble here.” And he closed his eyes.

  Freddy got up and poked him again. As long as he was poking he felt quite lively. But when he sat down again—well, it was very warm and comfortable in the bank. And you couldn’t keep getting up and poking people if you wanted to get any work done. Suddenly his jaw flew open in an uncontrollable yawn. “Darn it!” he thought. “I am catching it from him!” He half got up to poke Ernest, Jr. again, and then sank back. It hardly seemed worth while. So warm, so comfortable.… Something hit him under the chin, and realizing that it was his chest, he snapped his head upright, blinking. And just then Cecil came in the door.

  The porcupine grinned. “Awake?” he asked.

  “Certainly ’m awake,” said Freddy. Then, shaking off his drowsiness he said briskly: “Been working steadily ever since you left.”

  “O. K.” said Cecil. “You win. But you only win by about five seconds. If I’d waited that much longer before coming in you’d have been snoring your head off.”

  “Nonsense!” said Freddy sharply. “However,” he added, “I admit your job is a tough one. You keep on with it, and I’ll hire one of the mice to drop in every ten minutes and see that you’re awake. Maybe if he doesn’t stay in here more than a minute I won’t have to hire anybody else to poke him. We’ll have to stop somewhere.”

  Chapter 5

  Mr. Dimsey had been rather doubtful about whether the work that a lot of different animals were to give in exchange for their subscriptions, would repay him for the trouble and expense of printing the Bean Home News. But when Freddy took the copy for the second issue down to Centerboro on the following Friday, he found that Mr. Dimsey was delighted. It was Hank’s day off, and the horse had got hitched up to the old phaeton, and had brought fifteen or twenty small animals down to start working out their subscriptions. When Freddy got there, Hank was helping Mr. Dimsey drag his garden, and a gang of rabbits and squirrels, under Sniffy Wilson, the skunk, were cleaning up the front yard, and weeding the lawn. Robert had brought the parlor rug out and was beating it with his tail, and Henrietta and several of her daugh
ters had pulled all the old dry last year’s stalks out of the flower bed and were raking it smooth with their claws.

  “At this rate,” said Mr. Dimsey, “I’ll have my garden work all done for me this year. And there’s a lot of work to a garden, Freddy. Hank tells me you’ve got a couple of ducks up there that are great little seed planters.”

  “Alice and Emma,” said Freddy. “Yes, you just mark the row with a string and tell ’em what you want in, and they’ll take a bill full of seeds and go straight down the line, poking them in faster than you can count. You see, we animals ran the farm one summer when the Beans were away, and we know how to do nearly everything.”

  “Well,” said Mr. Dimsey, “I don’t see any reason why you and I can’t build up a nice business. Because there’s another thing that I haven’t told you. I printed up a few extra copies of last week’s issue and passed them around in Centerboro, and fourteen people in town have subscribed already. Some of them, like the sheriff, are friends of yours, and some of them subscribed, I guess, because they thought an animal newspaper was sort of a curiosity to show around. But we don’t care why, as long as we get their dollar.”

  “Maybe we ought to have a page of Centerboro news in the paper,” said Freddy. “Then more of them would subscribe.”

  “I could write such a page, all right,” said Mr. Dimsey. “But then it wouldn’t be an animal newspaper.”

  “I could write it,” said Freddy. “If I had anything to write. But not living in Centerboro—” He stopped. “I have it,” he said. “Henrietta has got an aunt in town, and the mice have relatives there too. I could hire some of them as reporters. Then we could have a column headed: ‘From our Centerboro Correspondent.’”