THE IMPORTANCE OF CROCUS

Why Crocus the crocodile is one of the animals on the Sweetpeas' sunny, placid old-fashioned farm we never know--though that puzzlement may not bother children who've met Crocus before. Otherwise, it's an old situation--for Duvoisin too: Crocus admires each of the other animals for what they can do, and he can't (Woolly the sheep grows wool, Bertha the duck can fly, etc.). ""We can all do something others cannot do,"" Trumpet the rooster reassures him. And when the Sweetpeas build a pond, Crocus discovers that he's the best swimmer and diver--and also the best at scaring off the ""enemies"" of the pond's geese and ducks. Some skeptics might even wonder, at this point, how Crocus got along before without a body of water. The pictures are fetching--there are no farms quite as bucolic as Duvoisin farms--but the story is very lame.