But at these words the young cow started, and with a wild bellow ran to the farthest end of the pasture. "Bossy!" she cried, staring wildly up at the silver globe, which was rising steadily higher and higher in the sky, "you are going away from me! Jump down from the moon, and come to your mother! Bossy! Bossy! _Come!_"
And then a distant voice, floating softly down through the air, answered, "Come! come!"
"He calls me!" cried the red cow. "My darling calls me, and I go. I will go to the moon; I will be a moon-cow! Bossy, Bossy, I come!"
She ran forward like an antelope, gave a sudden leap into the air, and went up, up, up,--over the haystacks, over the trees, over the clouds,--up among the stars.
But, alas! in her frantic desire to reach the moon she overshot the mark; jumped clear over it, and went down on the other side, nobody knows where, and she never was seen or heard of again.
And Mother Brindle, when she saw what had happened, ran straight home and gobbled up the warm mash before any of the other cows could get there, and ate so fast that she made herself ill.
"That is the whole story," said the squirrel, seriously; "and it seemed to me a very curious one, I confess."
"Very!" said Toto, dryly. "But there's nothing about the others in it,--the cat and fiddle, and the little dog, you know."
"Well, they _weren't_ in it really, at all!" replied Cracker. "They were all lies, Mrs. Cow says, every one of them."
"Humph!" said Toto "Well, Mrs. Cow ought to be a good judge of lies, I should say."
"What can be expected," said the raccoon loftily, "from a creature who eats hay? Be good enough to hand me those nuts, Toto, will you? The story has positively made me hungry,--a thing that has not happened--"
"Since dinner-time!" said Toto. "Wonderful indeed, Coon! But I shall hand the nuts to Cracker first, for he has told us a very good story, whether it is true or not."
THE apples and nuts went round again and again, and for a few minutes nothing was heard save the cracking of shells and the gnawing of sharp white teeth. At length the parrot said, meditatively:--
"That was a very stupid cow, though! Are all cows as stupid as that?"
"Well, I don't think they are what you would call brilliant, as a rule," Toto admitted; "but they are generally good, and that is better."