PETER RABBIT LEARNS BY SITTING STILL
By sitting still may much be learned
And thus be useful knowledge earned.
_Little Joe Otter._
Do you know that you can learn things by sitting perfectly still? You
can. That is, you can if you use your eyes and use your ears and all the
other senses that Old Mother Nature has given you. Peter Rabbit
discovered it quite by accident. You know how curious he is. It seems as
if his curiosity never can be satisfied.
On the day that Little Joe Otter invited him to call at his home and
then promptly disappeared, Peter could think of nothing but that home,
and wonder where it was. Whenever he got the chance he went over to the
Green Forest to look for Little Joe and his home. He had hopped up and
down the banks of the Laughing Brook until his feet ached, and he was
just as wise as before.
At last one day, he sat down just a little way from a great big tree
with spreading roots near the bank of a little pool in the Laughing
Brook. He was tired. Also he was discouraged. “I don’t believe Little
Joe has a home at all,” he muttered. Then, because he was tired, he
squatted down in a little brown heap and closed his eyes. How long he
slept Peter never knew. When he awoke it was very, very still there in
the Green Forest. He felt rested and therefore in a better frame of
mind. He decided he would sit there a little longer and enjoy his
beautiful surrounding’s before going back to the dear Old Briar-patch.
Now when Peter sits perfectly still, he is very hard to see. He looks
like nothing so much as a little brown heap of dead leaves, and that was
the way he was looking then. But all the time he was watching this way
and that way to see what he could discover. Quite without any warning at
all there was a rustling of leaves between two of the roots of the old
tree a little way off. Peter didn’t have to turn his head to look. You
see, his eyes are set so far back that he can see without turning his
head. What he saw made him catch his breath and open his eyes wider than
ever. What do you think it was? Why it was a little brown baby rolling
and tumbling in the leaves!
Peter had never seen a baby like it before. While he was watching and
wondering whose baby it could be, another joined it. They tumbled and
rolled over each other. They played tug-of-war with a little stick, each
holding one end. They made believe bite each other. It was very rough
play, but the rougher it was the better they seemed to like it. Peter
watched them for a long time. Then, because he had a cramp in one of his
feet, he moved ever so little, and in doing so he rustled the leaves.
Instantly the two brown babies disappeared as if the earth had swallowed
them up. Peter waited, but they didn’t appear again.
At last his curiosity proved too much for him. He hopped over to the
spreading roots of the old tree and there was the nicest little doorway
he had ever seen. He knew then where the two brown babies had
disappeared.
“I wonder,” muttered Peter, “whose babies those were. I wonder—” A
sudden thought popped into his head. It made him jump right up in the
air. “Do you suppose that those could have been Little Joe Otter’s
babies?” he exclaimed right out loud to nobody in particular. Then,
because he was so full of his discovery, he scampered away to the dear
Old Briar-patch to tell Mrs. Peter all about it.
[Illustration: One morning he saw Mrs. Joe out with the two
babies. _Page 28._]