the taste at all.

"That's a bad one!" he remarked. And then he tried another kernel--and
another--and another. But they were all like the first one.

Thereupon, Mr. Crow paused and looked at the corn. And he saw at once
that there was something wrong. The kernels were gray, instead of a
golden yellow. He pecked at one of them and found that the gray coating
hid something black and sticky.

That was tar, though Mr. Crow did not know it. And the gray covering was
wood-ashes, in which Farmer Green had rolled the corn after dipping it in
tar. The tar made the corn taste bad. And the wood-ashes kept it from
sticking to one's fingers.

"This is a great disappointment," said Mr. Crow very solemnly. "Of all
the mean tricks that Farmer Green has played on me, this is by far the
meanest. It would serve him right if I went away and never caught a
single grasshopper or cutworm all summer."

But there were two reasons that prevented Mr. Crow's leaving Pleasant
Valley. He liked his old home. And he liked grasshoppers and cutworms,
too. So he stayed until October. And the strange part of it was that he
never once discovered that Farmer Green had planted tarred corn only in a
border around the field. Inside that border the corn was of the good, old
yellow kind that Mr. Crow liked.

And so, for once, Farmer Green out-witted old Mr. Crow.

By the end of the summer his corn had grown so tall and borne so many big