VI. WHEN MR. MOOSE LOST HIS HORNS
PETER RABBIT had just seen Flathorns the Moose for the first time, and Peter was having hard work to believe that there wasn't something the matter with his eyes. Indeed they looked as if something was the matter with them, for they seemed about to pop right out of his head. If any one had told Peter that any one as big as Flathorns lived in the Great Woods, he wouldn't have believed it, but now that he had seen that it was so, he just had to believe. So Peter sat with his eyes popping out and his mouth gaping wide open in the most foolish way as he stared in the direction in which Flathorns had gone.
“Big, isn't he?”
Peter looked up to see Blacky the Crow in the top of a birch-tree just at one side, and Blacky, too, was looking after Flathorns. Then Blacky looked down at Peter and began to laugh. “Don't try to swallow him, Peter!” said he.
[Original]
Peter closed his mouth with a snap.
“My, but he is big!” he exclaimed. “I never felt so small in all my life as when I first caught sight of him. What queer horns he has! I suppose they are horns, for he carries them on his head just as Lightfoot the Deer does his. They are so big I should think they would make his head ache.”