BENJAMIN BRIGHT-EYES

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 176, 15 October 1927, Page 31 (Supplement)

BENJAMIN BRIGHT-EYES

Benjamin Bright Eyes combed his whiskers very carefully, gave his glossy coat another brush, and looked at himself in the clear little stream that was his looking-glass. Two big tears ran down Benjamin’s face and fell “plop-plop” into the stream, for Benjamin Bright Eyes was very miserable. You see, Benjamin was a very fine water-rat, and you and I would have thought that he would have been very satisfied with himself, but he wasn’t. His trouble was that he didn’t like his tail! He was as jealous as could be of Septimus Squirrel, because he had a great red-brown bush of a tail, and Benjamin would have given just anything to have had a tail like that. Very unhappily, Benjamin went for a walk. “I wish oh, I do wish, that I had a bushy tail like Septimus Squirrel,” he said. Now, Benjamin, when he said that, was standing in the middle of a fairy’s toadstool ring, and of course he got his wish! You would have thought that Benjamin would have been pleased then, and so he was at first, but as soon as he started walking his troubles began. For, of course, Septimus Squirrel was used to having a large and bushy tail, but poor Benjamin wasn’t, and he kept on overbalancing. He got muddy and hot and cross and went homo Just as he reached the door of his house Oliver Owl swooped down to catch him. Of course, if Benjamin had only had a proper tail he would have shot straight through his doorway out of danger, but that terrible squirrel tail stuck fast in the doorway, and Oliver Owl caught hold of it and dragged poor Benjamin out. How Benjamin squealed! “I wish that I had never been silly enough to want a squirrel tail!” he sobbed. And luckily for Benjamin at that moment Oliver Owl was flying over the fairy toadstool ring and Benjamin immediately got back his own proper tail again! Oliver was so surprised that he let Benjamin go and as Benjamin scuttled off to get ready for Winifred Waterrat’s party, he made up his mind that never again would he wish to be smarter and grander than he was.