Freddy the Pied Piper Read Online Free

half-finished picture of Jinx, and beside it stood a mirror in front of which lay the cat, apparently asleep.
    â€œHi, Jinx!” Freddy shouted. And as the cat gave a start and opened his eyes, he said: “Asleep, hey? So that’s what you do up here.”
    â€œ Hi, Jinx!” Freddy shouted.
    â€œI was not!” Jinx said crossly. “I was looking in the glass—painting my picture.”
    â€œOh, sure,” said Freddy. “Painting with your eyes shut.”
    â€œOf course I had my eyes shut,” said the cat. “That’s the way they are to be in the picture. It’s a picture of me asleep.”
    â€œYou can’t ever see what you look like asleep,” Freddy said, “any more than you can see between your shoulder blades.”
    â€œI can see between my shoulder blades,” said the cat, and he twisted his head around to show the pig.
    â€œOh, all right,” Freddy said. “Look, Jinx. You can’t see yourself in the glass unless your eyes are open. So if you want to paint your picture with your eyes shut—”
    â€œI shut ’em, and then I open ’em very quick,” Jinx said. “I open ’em just before my reflection opens ’em, so that just for a second my reflection has his eyes shut and I can see what it looks like. See?”
    â€œNo,” said Freddy, “but it doesn’t make any difference.” He looked around. “You must be awful stuck on yourself to paint nothing but your own portrait all the time.”
    â€œâ€™Tisn’t that, Freddy,” Jinx said. “There isn’t anything else to paint. None of you other animals will pose for me. Hank gets cramps in his legs, and Mrs. Wiggins goes to sleep, and—”
    â€œYou could paint landscapes,” Freddy said.
    â€œWhat landscapes? Look out that window and show me a landscape I could paint.”
    Freddy looked. It was true there was very little to see. Just the broad expanse of white, broken only by the line of a fence and a tree trunk or two. Then he looked around at the one or two little landscapes Jinx had done last fall before the snow came, when he first started painting. Each of them had a little label under it—“Woodland Peace,” or “Giants of the Forest,” or “Moon Shadows.” This last showed the pigpen in the foreground, and Freddy grinned. “Very fanciful titles,” he said. “When the moon comes over the pigpen—we could make a song of it. But I don’t agree with you that there’s nothing to paint. Do a snow scene.” He propped up a blank canvas board on the easel, then with a brush made two horizontal lines for the fence and above them, two thicker vertical lines for the tree trunks. “There you are,” he said. “There’s your landscape. Slap in a little blue sky above it and you’ve got ‘Winter Fields’ or something, and my goodness, you can paint twenty of them in an hour and not use up more than a couple squeezes of paint.”
    â€œGolly, I believe you’ve got something there,” said Jinx. He backed off and squinted at the picture with his head on one side. “Yes, sir, that’s art with a capital A.”
    â€œPooh,” said Freddy. “That’s nothing. But look here, Jinx. I need your help.” And he told him about Mr. Boomschmidt.
    Jinx was interested at once. He tossed aside his palette and brushes and sat down and listened intently, and then he scratched his head. He didn’t scratch it as you or I would scratch our heads—he scratched it with his left hind foot, but it meant the same thing—that he was thinking deeply. And at last he said: “I’m afraid you’ve tackled a job that’s too big even for you, Freddy. To get even a little one-horse circus like Mr. Boomschmidt’s on the road again would take a lot more money than we could ever raise. Money to hire the clowns