“I really did have him, Mother!” Teddy insisted. “I could feel his soft fur, and he was right in my bed.”
“Nonsense, Teddy!” exclaimed his father. “You just dreamed it!”
“No! Look! Oh, I feel him now!” cried the little boy. “Here he is in bed with me! He’s under the covers, down by my feet!”
His father and mother looked. Surely enough, something was moving under the bed clothes, and it was not Teddy’s toes that were wiggling, for they could be seen, sticking up under the sheet, off to one side.
Daddy Martin, with a quick motion, turned back the sheet. Out on the floor jumped a big gray animal with a very large tail.
“That’s what it was!” cried Teddy. “I knew I felt something soft and fuzzy.”
“It’s a big gray squirrel!” said Mr. Martin. “He must have crawled in bed with Teddy. No wonder you felt something like Skyrocket’s fuzzy coat,” he added.
“Oh, get the squirrel for me!” begged Teddy. But the squirrel did not wait to be caught. It was one thing to be in a soft warm bed in the dark with a little boy, but quite another to have big folks looking at him in the light. So the squirrel scurried out of an open window and disappeared in the darkness off the porch.
“There! it wasn’t a dream, was it?” asked Teddy, when it was certain that the squirrel had gone.
“No, it was part real,” his father said with a laugh. “Now go to sleep.”