l. "Foolish, foolish, foolish!" he said over and over
to himself. "Why can't Peter be content with the good things that
he has?"

Peter Rabbit hurried along through the moonlight, stopping every
few minutes to sit up to look and listen. He heard the fierce
hunting call of Hooty the Owl way over in the Green Forest, so he
felt sure that at present there was nothing to fear from him. He
knew that since their return to the Green Meadows and the Green
Forest, Granny and Reddy Fox had kept away from Farmer Brown's,
so he did not worry about them.

All in good time Peter came to the young orchard. It was just as
Tommy Tit the Chickadee had told him. Peter hopped up to the
nearest peach tree and nibbled the bark. My, how good it tasted!
He went all around the tree, stripping off the bark. He stood up
on his long hind legs and reached as high as he could. Then he
dug the snow away and ate down as far as he could. When he could
get no more tender young bark, he went on to the next tree.

Now, though Peter didn't know it, he was in the very worst kind
of mischief. You see, when he took off all the bark all the way
around the young peach tree, he killed the tree, for you know it
is on the inside of the bark that the sap which gives life to a
tree and makes it grow goes up from the roots to all the
branches. So when Peter ate the bark all the way around the trunk
of the young tree, he had made it impossible for the sap to come
up in the spring. Oh, it was the worst kind of mischief that
Peter Rabbit was in.

But Peter didn't know it, and he kept right on filling that big
stomach of his and enjoying it so much that he forgot to watch
out for danger. Suddenly, just as he had begun on another tree, a
great roar right behind him made him jump almost out of his skin.
He knew that voice, and without waiting to even look behind him,
he started for the stone wall on the other side of the orchard.
Right at his heels, his great mouth wide open, was Bowser the
Hound.

XIV

Farmer Brown Sets a Trap

Peter Rabbit was in trouble. He had got into mischief and now,
like everyone who gets into mischief, he wished that he hadn't.
The worst of it was that he was a long way from his home in the
dear Old Briar-patch, and he didn't know how he ever could get
back there again. Where was he? Why, in the stone wall on one
side of Farmer Brown's young peach orchard. How Peter blessed the
old