"Nurse Jane will surely like this," said the bunny gentleman. He was about to hop on again when, all of a sudden, he heard someone crying in the woods. There was a sobbing sound and, looking around the corner of a tree, Uncle Wiggily saw a little girl, sitting on a log. And she was crying as hard as she could cry!
"That isn't the Freckled Girl," said the bunny gentleman to himself. "She said she wouldn't mind her freckles after she looked at the pretty speckled birds' eggs. It isn't the Freckled Girl. I wonder who she is, and what's the matter?"
And pretty soon Uncle Wiggily found out, for he heard the sobbing girl say:
"Oh, I wish I had money enough to buy one! All the other girls and boys can buy valentines to send teacher, but I can't! And she'll think I don't like her, but I do! Oh, I wish I had a valentine!"
"My goodness me sakes alive and some peanut pudding!" whispered the bunny rabbit gentleman. "That girl is crying because she hasn't a valentine for her teacher!"
Then the bunny gentleman looked down at the box, wrapped in tissue paper, which he carried under his paw—the box in which he had placed something he had found under the leaves and snow of the forest a little while before.
"She wants a valentine," murmured the bunny rabbit gentleman. "And here I have one that I made for Nurse Jane. I was going to leave it on the steps and surprise my muskrat lady housekeeper. But I suppose I could give it to this little girl, and—well, Nurse Jane won't care, when I tell her."
"I'll do it! I'll give this girl my valentine," said Uncle Wiggily so suddenly that his pink nose almost twinkled backward.
He looked over the top of a bush behind which he had sat down to wrap up Nurse Jane's valentine. Then the bunny hopped over to the girl who sat on the log, still sobbing because she had no token for her teacher.
The girl heard the rustling in the leaves, made by Uncle Wiggily's paws as he hopped, and she looked up suddenly. Then she rubbed her eyes, hardly able to believe what she saw.