The immortal Yertle was first published by the equally immortal Dr. Seuss in 1950.
Once upon a time, on the island of Sala-ma-Sond, lived a colony of turtles over which Yertle was the king. He reigned from a rock he called his throne, but he was beginning to get frustrated. A great king really ought to be able to see all he rules over, and from that lowly stone, he couldn’t see much at all. So he began piling turtles on top of each other to make him a higher throne. The higher he climbed, the more delighted he became. Mountains! Cows! Fields! Forests! And because he believed himself to be king of all he could see, Yertle began to consider himself the most wealthy king in all the world. No king was higher than him, so he must be the greatest.
His turtles, however, didn’t like his attitude. It was hard to stand, all day long, balanced on the top of someone else’s shell, with someone standing on top of you! They were tired and hungry and hot, but their king didn’t care. He was happy – that is, until he saw the moon. The moon was higher than him, and he couldn’t stand for that. Yertle called for every turtle in the land to come and contribute to his amazing turtle-tower-throne, but the stack toppled, and Yertle fell right into the mud, where all the turtles were content to let him stay. The turtles had a right to be free, as do we all.
The next story in this compilation book is “Gertrude McFuzz.” Gertrude was a bird with just one tail feather, and she was a little sad that she didn’t have a gorgeous, multi-colored tail like Lolla-Lee-Lou. The more Gertrude thought about it, the more jealous she got, until she determined that she would have a tail just like that. She went to see her uncle, the doctor, who tried to tell her that her tail was just right for her, but she wouldn’t have any of that. He finally broke down and told her where to find a special berry that would make her tail grow. With the very first berry she ate, she sprouted a wonderful blue feather. She kept gobbling, and grew green feathers too!
She looked marvelous, but she couldn’t stop there. Grabbing and gobbling as fast as she could, she soon had the most deluxe set of tail feathers ever seen on a bird in the whole history of bird tail feathers. Sure she would make Lolla-Lee-Lou jealous, she tried to head home, only to find that her tail was now so heavy, she couldn’t fly. Her uncle came to her rescue and pulled every one of those extra feathers, and now Gertrude feels much wiser.
Next we read “The Big Brag,” about a rabbit who considers himself to be the best there is. A bear hears him boasting, and challenges him to prove it. The rabbit declares that he can hear farther than any animal alive, and after several moments of concentration, says that he heard a fly on a faraway mountain cough. The bear, not wanting to be outdone, says he can smell better than any other animal alive, and says that way beyond the mountain is a pond, and on the banks of that pond is a nest with tiny hummingbird eggs in it, and one of them has gone a little stale.
The argument commences until a worm pops his head up out of a nearby hole and claims that he can see better than either of them. He concentrates, and then tells them that he has seen all the way around the world, back to where they are standing, and he can see two of the biggest fools ever, wasting time arguing over who’s better than who. And that put them in their places.
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