stand on the bottom of his cage twitching his tail over his back and looking at us with his bright eyes. Sometimes when he got very lonely and longed for the woods, oh, so much! he would sing his forest song, keeping time with twitches of his tail and patting of his paws:
Chitter, chitter, chee, wild and free,
Chitter, chitter, chee, follow me."
Master Frisky looked very much astonished the first time he heard this song; but he soon learned to expect it, and even listen for Gray-brush's cheery song of the woods.
When he was tired of this chatter that his mother had taught him so long ago, he would sit up and look straight at us and bark. His bark sounded quite like that of a little dog, only it was not so loud. And so with eating nuts and running his wheel, barking and chattering, and singing his forest song, Gray-brush passed away the time as best he could. But he thought very often of his brothers and sisters, of his old father and mother, and of his many cousins, all of whom thought him dead except his mother, who still said that he would some day come back to them.
"Oh, dear!" sighed poor Gray-brush, springing from his wheel to the bottom of his cage, one summer morning, "I do hate this old cage, it is so hot and stuffy and small. Oh, I wish I was free, and out in the woods!"
