STORY XIV—BILLY BUNNY AND THE BILLY GOAT
I’m sorry, but Billy Bunny threw away the pill box after the donkey was cured, so I can’t tell you the name of those little sugar coated pills, but if you call up Dr. Quack, one, two, three, down goes she, I’m sure he will prescribe for you over the wire, and perhaps then you won’t have to take any medicine at all.
Well, it’s time now to tell about Billy Bunny and Uncle Lucky Lefthindfoot, his dear, kind, generous rabbit uncle.
“I’m never going to give anybody any medicine as long as I live,” said the old gentleman rabbit, taking out his blue polka-dot handkerchief and wiping his spectacles and then the back of his neck and the tip of his nose.
“You never even get thanked for it.” And then Uncle Lucky put his handkerchief on his nose and his spectacles in his pocket. Oh, dear me! I mean he did just what I didn’t say he did, and after that he climbed into the Luckymobile beside Billy Bunny and drove away.
“Hip hurrah! Hip hurray!
I’m going to join the colors to-day.
Maybe I’ll be a soldier gay,
Or a sailor boy on the ocean spray.
It all depends what they’re going to say
When I tell them I want to join the fray.”
“Who’s singing?” asked Uncle Lucky, holding his right paw behind his left ear and wiggling his nose up and down and sideways so fast that it made a little fly dizzy to look at it. And just then they came across a Billy Goat standing outside a tent dressed in khaki with a gun over his shoulder.
“Halt! Who goes there?” cried the sentry. “Halt!” and of course Uncle Lucky put on the brakes and made the Luckymobile stop right then and there.
“Friend or foe?” asked the sentry, looking into the automobile and lifting the cushions off the seats and opening the cabaret and lighting the lamps and honking the horn, and, oh, dear me! doing anything and everything he could to annoy good, kind Uncle Lucky.
“What do you think we are?” asked Billy Bunny. “We are U. S. A. Bunnies. Don’t you make any mistake about that!”