“Well, this isn’t so bad,” thought Flop Ear, as he nibbled the carrot. “If this boy knows my friend Squinty I guess he will be kind to me. So some children are going to take Squinty away for a pet; are they? I hope they will be good to him, and give him what he likes to eat.”
All this while Flop Ear himself was eating the carrot, one of his ears standing up, and the other drooping down, and he looked so funny that the boy and his mother had to laugh.
“I did not know rabbits would come in our woodshed,” the boy said. “I wonder what made this one do so?”
“Perhaps he was hungry,” said Jimmie’s mother. And that was the reason, as you know, why Flop Ear had come to the farmhouse and had gone into the shed.
Flop Ear was not so frightened now. He looked all about him, and he thought he was in a very queer place—a farmhouse kitchen. There was a big black thing there, and in it was a fire. Flop Ear knew what fire was, for once the woods near his burrow were blazing, and the rabbits had to run underground and stay there to keep away from the hot flames.
“I wonder why people want fires in their houses!” thought Flop Ear. “We never have any in our burrow.”
Then he saw Jimmie’s mother put a pan on the big black thing with fire in it, and soon white smoke, so it seemed to Flop Ear, rose from the pan. Jimmie’s mother was cooking dinner over the fire, made with some of the wood taken from the basket in which the rabbit had hidden.
“Flop Ear,” said the boy, speaking to the rabbit just as if it could understand—“Flop Ear, you are a nice bunny, and I like you. I am going to keep you for myself, and I will teach you some tricks in a few days when you are not so frightened. And I must make a little house for you to stay in. A box will do, though I suppose you can gnaw your way out with your teeth if you don’t like it. But I will get a strong box, and give you plenty to eat, and maybe you will not try to get away.”
“I think you are a very nice boy,” thought Flop Ear to himself. “You seem to be kind to me, but still I can not promise to stay always with you. I want to go back to my own home and folks. But I will stay here a while and eat carrots.”
Of course the boy could not know Flop Ear was thinking this. But the boy could see that the rabbit was not so frightened as he had been at first.