And the big man put his golf stick in the bag and watched Billy Bunny limp away to hide in the woods close by.
STORY XVII.
BILLY BUNNY AND THE FOREST DANCE.
When the moon is big and bright
Little bunnies dance at night.
How they hop and skip and go
On their lucky left hind toe.
Well, sir, that's what Billy Bunny was doing. It was a lovely moonlight night in August, and the big, round moon was gleaming down on the Pleasant Meadow just like an electric lamp, only it was up in the sky, you know, and not on the ceiling.
And Mrs. Bunny was there, too, and so was Cousin Cottontail, and all the little rabbits for miles around.
Now it's a dangerous thing to be dancing, even if the moon is bright, for owls and hawks fly by night, and if they happen to see a bunny dance, they always fly down and break it up. They don't say a word; they just fly away with one of the little bunny dancers and he never dances any more. No, sireemam.
Well, on this particular night little Billy Bunny was doing the fox trot with a nice little lady bunny, when all of a sudden from out of the Friendly Forest came Slyboots and Bushy Tail, the small sons of Daddy Fox, you remember.
And the reason they were out so late at night was because their father had sprained his foot jumping over a stone fence to get away from a pack of hounds who had chased him for a thousand and one miles and fourteen feet.
Now Billy Bunny had forgotten all about Daddy Fox. He was thinking only about Robber Hawk or Old Barney the Owl, and so he never saw the two foxes until they were so close to him that they almost stubbed their whiskers on his powder puff tail.