Mr. Rabbit sat down then, and of course everybody spoke up as soon as they could get their breath and said how nice it was, and how Mr. Rabbit always expressed himself better in poetry than anybody else could in prose, and how the words and rhymes just seemed to flow along as if he were reeling it off of a spinning-wheel and could keep it up all day.
And Mr. Rabbit smiled and said he supposed it came natural, and that sometimes it was harder to stop than it was to start, and that he could keep it up all day as easy as not.
Then Mr. 'Possum said he'd been afraid that was what would happen, and that if Mr. Rabbit hadn't stopped pretty soon that he—Mr. 'Possum, of course—would have been so tangled up in his mind that somebody would have had to come and undo the knot.
Then he said he wanted to ask some questions. He said he wanted to know what "wold" meant, and also what Mr. Rabbit meant by spinning their tails. He said he hadn't noticed that any of them were spinning their tails, and that he couldn't do it if he tried. He said that he could curl his tail and hang from a limb or a peg by it, and he had found it a good way to go to sleep when things were on his mind, and that he generally had better dreams when he slept that way.
MR. 'POSSUM WANTED TO KNOW WHAT MR. RABBIT MEANT BY SPINNING THEIR TAILS
He said that of course Mr. Rabbit's poem had been about tails of the long ago, and he supposed that he meant the ones which his family had lost about three hundred years ago, according to Mr. Turtle, but that he didn't believe they ever could spin them much, or that Mr. Rabbit could spin what he had left.
Mr. 'Possum was going on to say a good deal more on the subject, but Mr. Rabbit interrupted him.
He said he didn't suppose there was anybody else in the world whose food seemed to do him so little good as Mr. 'Possum's, and that very likely it was owing to the habit he had of sleeping with his head hanging down in that foolish way. He said he had never heard of anybody who ate so much and knew so little.