The Little Red Hen


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Title: The Little Red Hen
       An Old English Folk Tale

Author: Florence White Williams

Illustrator: Florence White Williams

Release Date: July 1, 2006 [EBook #18735]

Language: English







Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Sankar Viswanathan, and the
Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net






 

 

THE LITTLE RED HEN

An Old English Folk Tale

 

Retold and Illustrated

by

FLORENCE WHITE WILLIAMS

 

 

The
Saalfield Publishing Company
Chicago - Akron, Ohio - New York

PRINTED IN U. S. A.

COPYRIGHT, 1918
BY
THE SAALFIELD PUBLISHING COMPANY

The Little Red Hen


Little Red Hen lived in a
barnyard. She spent almost all of
her time walking about the barnyard

in

her

picketty-pecketty

fashion,

scratching

everywhere

for

worms.

 

 


he dearly loved fat, delicious worms and felt they were absolutely necessary to the health of her children. As
often as

 

she

found a

worm

she

would

call

 

Chuck-chuck-chuck! to her chickies.


hen they were gathered about her, she would distribute choice morsels of her tid-bit. A busy little body was she!

A cat usually napped lazily in the barn door, not even bothering herself to scare the rat who ran here and there as

 

he pleased.

And

as for

the pig

who lived

in the

sty—he

did

not care what

happened so long as he could eat and grow fat.

 

 


ne day the Little Red Hen found a Seed. It was a Wheat Seed, but the Little Red Hen was so accustomed to bugs and worms that she supposed this to be some new and perhaps very delicious kind of meat. She bit it gently and found that it resembled a worm in no way whatsoever as to taste although because it was long and slender, a Little Red Hen might easily be fooled by its appearance.

 


arrying it about, she made many inquiries as to what it might be. She found it was a Wheat Seed and that, if planted, it would grow up and when ripe it could be made into flour and then into bread.

When she discovered

 

that, she knew it ought

 

to be planted. She was

 

so busy hunting food for

 

herself and her family

 

that, naturally, she

 

thought she ought not

 

to take time to plant it.


o she thought of the Pig—upon whom time must hang heavily and of the Cat who had nothing to do, and of the great fat Rat with his idle hours, and she called loudly:

 

“Who


will


plant


the


Seed”

 

But the Pig said, “Not I,”

and the Cat said, “Not I,”

and the Rat said, Not I.

“Well, then,” said the Little Red Hen, I will.

And she did.


hen she went on with her daily duties through the long summer days, scratching for worms and feeding her chicks, while

the Pig grew fat,

and the Cat grew fat,

and the Rat grew fat,

and the Wheat