Pee-wee!" Peter chuckled
happily. "I declare, there's Pee-wee," he cried. "He usually is one of
the last of the Flycatcher family to arrive. I didn't expect to find him
yet. I wonder what has brought him up so early."

It didn't take Peter long to find Pewee. He just followed the sound of
that voice and presently saw Pewee fly out and make the same kind of
a little circle as the other members of the family make when they are
hunting flies. It ended just where it had started, on a dead twig of a
tree in a shady, rather lonely part of the Green Forest. Almost at once
he began to call his name in a rather sad, plaintive tone, "Pee-wee!
Pee-wee! Pee-wee!" But he wasn't sad, as Peter well knew. It was his way
of expressing how happy he felt. He was a little bigger than his cousin,
Chebec, but looked very much like him. There was a little notch in the
end of his tail. The upper half of his bill was black, but the lower
half was light. Peter could see on each wing two whitish bars, and he
noticed that Pewee's wings were longer than his tail, which wasn't the
case with Chebec. But no one could ever mistake Pewee for any of his
relatives, for the simple reason that he keeps repeating his own name
over and over.

"Aren't you here early?" asked Peter.

Pewee nodded. "Yes," said he. "It has been unusually warm this spring,
so I hurried a little and came up with my cousins, Scrapper and Cresty.
That is something I don't often do."

"If you please," Peter inquired politely, "why do folks call you Wood
Pewee?"

Pewee chuckled happily. "It must be," said he, "because I am so very
fond of the Green Forest. It is so quiet and restful that I love
it. Mrs. Pewee and I are very retiring. We do not like too many near
neighbors."

"You won't mind if I come to see you once in a while, will you?" asked
Peter as he prepared to start on again for the dear Old Briar-patch.

"Come as often as you like," replied Pewee. "The oftener the better."

Back in the Old Briar-patch Peter thought over all he had learned about
the Flycatcher family, and as he recalled how they were forever catching
all sorts of flying insects it suddenly struck him that they must be
very useful little people in helping Old Mother Nature take care of her
trees and other growing things which insects so dearly love to destroy.

But most of all Peter thought about that queer request of Cresty's, and
a dozen times that day he found himself peeping under old logs in the
h