TO be indignant is to be angry in a good cause. If you lose your temper and give way to anger because things do not suit you, you are not indignant; you are simply angry. But if anger wells up in your heart because of harm or injustice¹ which is done to some one else, or even to yourself, then you become indignant.
 
Farmer Brown's boy had spent all his spare time down in the garden watching Bob White and his family. In fact, he had been there so much that all the Bob Whites had come to look on him as harmless if not actually a friend. They just didn't pay him any attention at all, but went about their business as if he were nowhere about. And their business was ridding that garden of bugs² and worms and seeds of weeds in order to fill their stomachs. What tickled⁴ Farmer Brown's boy was that the bugs and worms of which they seemed the most fond were the very ones which did the most harm to the growing plants.
 
Over beyond the garden was a field of wheat. You know from wheat comes the flour of which your bread is made. Now there is a certain little bug³ called the chinch-bug which is such a hungry rascal⁵ that when he and a lot of his kind get into a field of wheat, they often spoil the whole crop. They suck the juices from the plants so that they wilt⁶ and die. Farmer Brown's boy had heard his neighbors complaining that chinch-bugs were very bad that year, and he knew that they must be by the looks of the wheat on the farms of his neighbors. But Farmer Brown's wheat looked as fine as wheat could look. It was very plain that there were no chinch-bugs there, and he often had wondered why, when they were so bad in the fields of his neighbors.
 
Farmer Brown's boy noticed that Bob White and his family spent a great deal of time in the wheat-field. One day he noticed Bob picking something from a stem of wheat. He went over to see what it might be. Of course Bob scurried⁷ away, but when Farmer Brown's boy looked at that wheat-plant he found some chinch-bugs on it. Then he knew what Bob had been doing. He had been picking off and eating those dreadful little bugs. And he knew, too, why it w............