“Will you do me just a little favor, Uncle Wiggily?” asked Baby Bunty one day, as she came home from school, and saw the dear old rabbit gentleman sitting in the sun outside his hollow stump bungalow.
“Do you a favor? Why, of course, I will, Baby Bunty,” said Mr. Longears to the little rabbit girl he had found in the woods. “But I hope it is a favor that will not make me hop around. I am a bit stiff from having gone on the picnic with you yesterday. Though I had a good time, after all,” he said.
“I’m glad you did,” said Baby Bunty. “This favor is a very easy one. You can sit there and do it. All I want you to do is to tell me what kind of woodland flowers to pick for a bouquet for the lady mouse teacher in the hollow stump school.”
“Oh, ho!” cried Uncle Wiggily. “So your lady mouse teacher wants a bouquet, does she?”
“Yes,” answered Baby Bunty. “She told each one of us to bring wild flowers to school tomorrow. Sammie and Susie Littletail, and Johnnie and Billie Bushytail, and Lulu and Alice and Jimmie Wibblewobble—they all know where to look in the woods for the blossoms. But I’m such a little rabbit girl I don’t know. So if you’ll tell me about the flowers, I’ll go pick them before supper, and have them ready for tomorrow.”
“Well,” said Uncle Wiggily, slowly like and disengaged, as he tilted back on his easy chair, “there are red flowers and blue ones, and golden yellow ones, and some of purple. They will make a nice bouquet when you pick them. Now run off in the woods, Baby Bunty, and pick some flowers. Then you’ll have pretty posies for your teacher.”
Uncle Wiggily closed his eyes, gave his pink nose a soft little twinkle and was dozing off again into a little before-supper sleep. Baby Bunty shook her little head.
“This will never do,” she thought. “Uncle Wiggily will get old and stiff, and he’ll think his rheumatism is worse and all things like that if I let him keep so quiet. I must rouse him up. I haven’t time to make him chase me, as I want to gather flowers. What shall I do? Oh, I know!”
Softly Baby Bunty hopped off on her tippy tip-paws. Into the woods, not far from the hollow stump bungalow, she went, and there she saw some red flowers. She began to pick them, looking back, now and then, through the trees to where Uncle Wiggily was asleep against the side of his hollow stump bungalow.
“I must rouse him up and make him more lively!” thought Baby Bunty. Then, all of a sudden, as she was picking pink flowers she gave a little scream and cried: