He was almost up to it. Would he be able to make it? One jump! He could hear Reddy panting. Two jumps! He could feel Reddy’s breath. Three jumps! He was on the rock! and—slowly Tommy rubbed his eyes. Reddy Fox was nowhere to be seen. Of course not! No fox would be foolish enough to come near a boy sitting in plain sight. Tommy looked over to the Old Briar-patch. That at least was real. Slowly he walked over to it. Peering under the bushes, he saw Peter Rabbit squatting perfectly still, yet ready to run.
“You don’t need to, Peter,” said he. “You don’t need to. You can cut one boy off that long list of enemies you are always watching for. You see, I know just how you feel, Peter!”
He walked around to the other side of the Briar-patch, and, stooping down, thumped the ground once with his hand. There was an answering thump from the spot where he had seen Peter Rabbit. Tommy smiled.
“We’re friends, Peter,” said he, “and it’s all on account of the wishing-stone. I’ll never hunt you again. My! I wouldn’t be a rabbit for anything in the world. Being a boy is good enough for me!”
CHAPTER TWO
WHY TOMMY BECAME A FRIEND OF RED SQUIRRELS
“I don’t see what Sis wants to string this stuff all over the house for, just because it happens to be Christmas!” grumbled Tommy, as he sat on a big stone and idly kicked at a pile of beautiful ground-pine and fragrant balsam boughs. “It’s the best day for skating we’ve had yet, and here I am missing a whole morning of it, and so tired that most likely I won’t feel like going this afternoon!”
Now Tommy knew perfectly well that if his mother said that he could go, nothing could keep him away from the pond that afternoon. He was a little tired, perhaps, but not nearly so tired as he tried to think he was. Gathering Christmas greens was work of course. But when you come right down to it, there is work about almost everything, even skating. The chief difference between work and pleasure is the difference between “must” and “want to.” When you must do a thing it becomes work; when you want to do a thing it becomes pleasure.
Right down deep inside, where his honest self lives, Tommy was glad that there was going to be a green wreath in each of the front windows, and that over the doors and pictures there would be sweet-smelling balsam. Without them, why, Christmas wouldn’t be Christmasy at all! And really it had been fun gathering those greens. He wouldn’t admit it, but it had. He wouldn’t have missed it for the world. It was only that it had to be done just when he wanted to do something else. And so he tried to feel grieved and persecuted, and to forget that Christmas was only two days off.
He sat on the big gray stone and looked across the Green Meadows, no longer green but covered with the whitest and lightest of snow-blankets, across the Old Pasture, not one whit less beautiful, to the Green Forest, and he sighed. It was a deep, heavy sigh. It was the sigh of a self-made martyr.