Tittlemouse with “cupboards of spotless linen” and fully furnished storerooms with sacks and bags floor to ceiling.Ī miserly soul, Susan works incessantly through the sunny summer months and has to go back and forth by the merry grasshoppers. The main character is the industrious ant Susan in a rusty black gown and black net cap, a “notable good housekeeper” like Mrs. 6.Potter titled her version of “The Ant and the Grasshopper” “Grasshopper Belle and Susan Emmet.” As tough-minded as La Fontaine’s “Le cigale et la formi,” “Grasshopper Belle” is one of the most powerful stories Potter wrote. There is no doubt who is going to triumph.įrom “The Fox and the Crow.” Animal Fables Adapted and Illustrated by Barbara McClintock, p. Lisbeth Zwerger draws the picture from the crow’s point of view, but the fox’s mock-serious gesture down on the ground expresses more amusement than disapproval in his hypocrisy. Tod’s wiles… But she is hardly the only female reteller of “The Fox and Crow” who won’t take the crow’s side. Perhaps Potter as a woman should have been less tolerant of Mr. He laughs until he cries and takes “no further notice of poor silly Miss Crow. He calls out, “She sings, she sings, louder, sweet sky lark” and Jenny drops her guard, opens her bill to caw, and drops the cheese into the foxy gentleman’s mouth.
When he exclaims that her voice must be “as sweet as a nightingale’s,” she croaks and he realizes she is weakening. His extravagant compliments make Jenny so nervous that she sidles up and down the branch, but without loosening her grip on the cheese. Tod appeals to Jenny’s vanity, calling her an “adorable smutty Venus,” “a beautiful black lady bird elegant as a newly tarred railing” whose grace outshines the black swans of Tasmania. Seeing an easy opportunity for dinner, Mr. Looking for his next meal, he spies Miss Jenny Crow perched in a tree, trying to manage the large chunk of cheese she stole from a farm boy’s dinner basket. Tod) who almost succeeded in making dinners of the foolish Jemima Puddleduck, her nest of eggs, and the careless Flopsy Bunnies at different times. Potter had brought back the foxy whiskered gentleman (aka Mr.
Beatrix Potter, The Tale of Jemima Puddleduck (1908).įruing did wish her retelling of ‘The Fox and the Crow” long enough to fill a little book. Jemima earnestly conversing with the foxy gentleman.
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