[STORY II]
UNCLE WIGGILY AND THE FRECKLED GIRL
Uncle Wiggily was hopping through the woods one summer day, when, as he happened to stop to get a drink of some water that the rain-clouds had dropped in the cup of a Jack-in-the-pulpit flower, the bunny gentleman heard a girl saying:
"Oh, I wish I could get them off! I wish I could scrub them off with sandpaper, or something like that! I've tried lemon juice and vinegar, but they won't go. And oh, they make me so homely!"
Uncle Wiggily stopped suddenly and rubbed the end of his pink, twinkling nose with the brim of his tall, silk hat.
"This is very queer," said the bunny uncle to himself. "I wonder what is it she has tried to take off with lemon juice? She seems very unhappy, this little girl does."
The bunny uncle looked through the trees and, seated on a green, mossy stump, he saw a girl about ten or twelve years old. She held a looking-glass in her hand, and as she glanced at her likeness in the mirror she kept saying:
"How can I get them off? How can I make them disappear so I will be beautiful? Oh, how I hate them!"
"What in the world can be the matter?" thought Uncle Wiggily to himself. For, as I have told you, the bunny gentleman was now able to hear and understand the talk of girls and boys, though he could not himself speak that language.
He hopped a little closer to the unhappy girl on the green, mossy stump, but the bunny stepped so softly on the leaf carpet of the forest that scarcely a sound did he make, and the girl with the mirror never heard him.