“Yes, I am lost!” said poor Flop Ear, after a bit. “I don’t know where my home is. Oh, I am lost! What shall I do?”
CHAPTER IV
FLOP EAR IN THE HAY
The little lost rabbit sat up on his hind legs and looked all around him. He was in the middle of a big wood, and while he liked the trees, the moss and the fallen leaves, which rustled under his feet, still Flop Ear liked best his own wood, where he had always lived. He did not know this wood at all.
“I wonder where Pink Nose and Snuggle are,” thought Flop Ear. “I wonder if they are lost, as I am.”
Then, even though he was lost, Flop Ear could not help feeling hungry, and, as he saw before him a tree, the bark of which he knew was good to eat, he nibbled some of it.
“That makes me feel a little better,” he said to himself. “Now I will try once more to find my house and my father and mother.”
Again Flop Ear set off through the woods, looking all about him for a sight of the open door of his burrow underground. But though he saw holes where groundhogs, or woodchucks, lived in fields near the woods, and though he saw some holes in which snakes crawled, he did not see his own home, and it made him lonesome.
Then he happened to remember a way rabbits have of calling to one another by thumping their feet on the ground. If you try that you can signal just as rabbits do, though you may not be able to make your thumps on the ground mean anything. If you go out in the yard some warm Summer day, and put your ear to the ground, and then some other boy or girl, some distance off, will pound his heel on the earth, you can hear it quite plainly.