"Looking up quickly, whom should I see but the Professor, who was slowly circling around the tree as if trying to make up his mind which of us he would invite to breakfast. Oh me! oh my! what a scurrying there was to get under cover! I went into the thorn bushes head first, nearly scratching my eyes out, and Cheeko's brother followed close at my heels, while as for Mr. Jay, he flew off with a screech, for more than one member of his family had gone to dinner with the Professor and never come back.
"Then, if you'll believe it, that miserable hawk lighted on the very lowest branch of the tree, where he could have an eye on all of us who had taken to cover, and Cheeko's brother said to me, his teeth chattering with fear so badly that I could hardly understand a word:
"'Now we're in the soup for certain! If one of us makes the littlest kind of move that villainous old Professor will pounce down. I wish Mr. Crow had attended to his own private matters instead of calling us together where, rather than protecting ourselves, we're likely to give that old scoundrel a breakfast.'
"'Keep under the sharpest thorns, no matter how badly your coat may be torn,' I whispered, and the Professor cocked his eye at me in a way that told he was figuring how he could best get his claws in my back."
At this moment Mr. Bunny chanced to see a particularly tempting bunch of clover, and he leaped toward it, without seeming to consider that it would have been more polite first to bring his story to a close.
CHAPTER VI
MR. MAN'S BOY TOMMY
"I suppose you think I'd have shown better manners if I'd asked you to excuse me before I lit out for that clover, eh?" Mr. Bunny Rabbit asked, as he hopped up on the log with his mouth filled with clover heads and leaves. "The trouble is that you don't know much of anything about it," he added, chewing meditatively on the green delicacy, while he gazed at a clump of ferns as if fancying it concealed an enemy.