The Green Grasshopper by Arthur Willis Colton

ANY one would have called Bobby Bell a comfortable boy -- that is, any / one who did not mind bugs; and I am sure I do not see why any one should / mind bugs, except the kind that taste badly in raspberries and some / other kinds. It was among the things that are entertaining to see Bobby / Bell bobbing around among the buttercups looking for grasshoppers. / Grasshoppers are interesting when you consider that they have heads / like door knobs or green cheeses and legs with crooks to them. "Bobbing" / means to go like Bobby Bell -- that is, to go up and down, to talk to / one's self, and not to hear any one shout, unless it is some one whom / not to hear is to get into difficulties.

Across the Salem Road from Mr. Atherton Bell's house there were many / level meadows of a pleasant greenness, as far as Cum-ming's alder swamp; / and these meadows were called the Bow Meadows. If you take the alder / swamp and the Bow Meadows together, they were like this: the swamp was / mysterious and unvisited, except by those who went to fish in the Muck / Hole for turtles and eels. Frogs with solemn voices lived in the swamp. / Herons flew over it slowly, and herons also are uncanny affairs. We / believed that the people of the swamp knew things it was not good to / know, like witchcraft and the insides of the earth. In the meadows, on / the other hand, there were any number of cheerful and busy creatures, / some along the level of the buttercups, but most of them about the roots / of the grasses. The people in the swamp were wet, cold, sluggish, and / not a great many of them.