“You awake?” asked Doctor Muskrat. “Well, that fortune was yours. I asked the stars most particularly. They wouldn’t tell me anything about your mother, but from the way they’re smiling I feel sure you’re going to find her in the end. They did say that Slyfoot had gone across the pond, so you had better hurry to the bank and find the quail.”
Which last was strictly true and not magic at all, because the stars had danced very hard in Slyfoot’s ripples.
CHAPTER III
NIBBLE RABBIT TO THE RESCUE!
“Go up on the bank and find the quail,” Doctor Muskrat had advised. So Nibble Rabbit set out as obediently as possible, because he meant to do exactly what the nice old gentleman told him to, though he didn’t know something that had happened while he was taking his nap on the snug little raft among the reeds.
You see, Doctor Muskrat had heard the quail come fluttering down to the pond for their evening drink, and he remembered that Bob White has the kindest heart in the world. So he squealed, very softly. And Bob flew right out to see what he wanted.
“Look at this bunny,” whispered the doctor, pointing his paddle paw at Nibble. “Whatever am I going to do with him? I can’t take him into the underwater door to my own house, because he can’t dive. And if I make a hole in my roof it will leak, and besides it will be far too convenient for that clever mink, Slyfoot. He’d come right in by my regular tunnel if he didn’t know I was asleep with my teeth bared at the end of it. Couldn’t you look after him until morning?”
“Surely I will,” answered Bob White. “Send him along as soon as he wakes. I’ll have our Watch Bird keep an eye out for him.” And off he flew.
So Nibble was hopping ashore repeating to himself his fortune that the stars had told the doctor for him.
“By dusk and by dawn he shall travel alone
And all troubles are his excepting his own.”