ise, a big rabbit rose near-by,
and turned to his companions.

"Beware!" he said. "It's a trick of Mr. Fox! We must run for it
altogether!"

Bumper didn't know just what the speaker meant by this last sentence. But
he soon found out. There was a rush and scramble in the bushes all around
him, and then a dozen or more rabbits appeared. They came toward the rock
like an army closing in upon the enemy, leaping over bushes or crawling
through the underbrush.

For a moment Bumper was startled. He had a vision of being attacked on all
sides by his country cousins and driven ignominiously from the woods. But
his anxiety was of short duration. The rabbits reached the side of the
rock, and disappeared as if by magic.

Then Bumper understood. They had made a simultaneous rush for their
burrow, knowing that this was the safest place for them. When the last
rabbit had disappeared, Bumper hopped down, and began looking for the
entrance. There was certainly an entrance to the burrow, or his cousins
couldn't have disappeared so quickly.

Bumper searched on every side for over an hour, but so artfully concealed
was the entrance to the burrow that he was unsuccessful. There was no
noise under the rock--nothing to indicate that there were rabbits there.

Discouraged and down-hearted, he was nearly ready to give up when he
happened to poke his head in the hollow end of a tree whose roots were
pinioned down by the huge rock. The small heart of the trunk had decayed,
offering an entrance just large enough for a rabbit to squeeze through.

Bumper thought this would be a safe place for him to spend the night, and
he began crawling through. The hole followed the trunk of the tree
downward for some distance. Then suddenly it turned sharply to the right.

At this point Bumper met an unexpected challenge. A big, gray rabbit at
the other end of the hollow trunk thumped hard with his two hind feet, and
instantly there was an uproar. Bumper had accidentally found his way into
the burrow through the hollow tree trunk!

"Stop where you are!" the rabbit guarding the hole shouted. "What do you
want in here?"

"I want to greet my cousins. If you don't let me come in Mr. Fox will
catch me after dark. I have no other home."

"You're not a rabbit!" replied the other. "We have no white cousins.
There're no white rabbits in the world."

"But I'm one," returned Bumper, amused by the same cry that had been made
by the crow and birds.

There was