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“There,” he said at last, not quite so crossly. “I can feel with them. The water’s awfully cold. And I had to stand in it all the time you beasts were talking. That hound is my very worst enemy—I can’t yet see for the life of me why he didn’t make a snap at Nibble Rabbit.”

“Because I belong to Tommy Peele,” Nibble explained. “Why don’t you make friends with him?”

“Huh!” grunted Tad, crosser than ever. “Do you s’pose those dogs would let me? Never!”

You know Nibble Rabbit. First he’s scared and next he’s curious. That’s why he has such a very good time—he’s always finding out about new things. But you don’t know Tad Coon—not yet. There’s this about Tad Coon. First, he’s very, very unhappy and then suddenly he’s got a lovely joke on someone.

He was very unhappy on this particular morning, though he was spread out very comfortably in the warm sun where Trailer had lain. Still he kept on complaining.

“It isn’t any trouble to you fellows to find a hole,” he was saying. “A nice spot to dig and there you are. But I live in trees, and not every tree in the woods has a big enough hollow for me to hide in. I used to sleep in that big oak—it went and blew down in the Terrible Storm” (he said this exactly as though the poor old oak did it on purpose), “and I had another that the wood-duck nested in. Silvertip the Fox spoiled the nest and he didn’t leave me a single egg, either. And I had the nicest of all in a great big elm; now there’s a cross old mother coon with four young ones in it. I haven’t any place to go-o-o!”