Hoppity the Grasshopper, after a period spent away, returns to an American city (Manhattan, New York (state)). He finds that all is not as he left it, and his insect friends (who live in the "Lowlands" just outside of the garden of a cute bungalow belonging to down-on-his-luck songwriter Dick Dickens and his wife Mary) are now under threat from the "human ones," who are trampling through the broken-down fence, using it as a shortcut.