at night. And, like Farmer Green himself, they felt that they must not
waste any of the precious daylight by lying abed late in the morning.
They wanted to be up and in the clover field as soon as it was light.

Now, with Rusty Wren living right beneath his bedroom window to wake him
at dawn, Farmer Green had no trouble in getting up in good season. But
the Bumblebee family were in no such luck. Even if Rusty Wren had lived
near them in the meadow they could scarcely have heard his dawn song,
because their home was beneath the surface of the ground, in the old
house that had once belonged to Mrs. Field Mouse.

If they could have found an alarm clock somewhere it would have been easy
for them to rise as early in the morning as they wished. But lacking a
clock of that kind--or any other--they had to find a different way of
waking themselves.

That was why the workers chose one of their number to be a trumpeter. And
it was her duty to get up bright and early, at three or four o'clock, and
trumpet loudly to rouse all the other workers.

How the trumpeter herself managed to awake is something that never
bothered anybody else. It was her business not to oversleep. And she knew
that it would be very unpleasant for her if she failed even once to do
her duty.

Now, it was all well enough for the workers to have the morning silence
broken by the blare of trumpeting. They were eager to get up and begin
their day's work. But Buster Bumblebee did not like that arrangement in
the least. He preferred a good, long night's sleep. And since he never
did any work he thought it was a shame that he should be rudely awakened