tternut
tree.

STORY X

UNCLE WIGGILY AND THE BUTTERNUT TREE

"Well, I declare!" exclaimed Nurse Jane Fuzzy Wuzzy, the muskrat lady
housekeeper of Uncle Wiggily Longears, the rabbit, as she looked in the
pantry of the hollow stump bungalow one day. "Well, I do declare!"

"What's the matter?" asked Mr. Longears, peeping over the top of his
spectacles. "I hope that the chimney hasn't fallen down, or the egg
beater run away with the potato masher."

"No, nothing like that," Nurse Jane said. "But we haven't any butter!"

"No butter?" spoke Uncle Wiggily, sort of puzzled like, and abstracted.

"Not a bit of butter for supper," went on Nurse Jane, sadly.

"Ha! That sounds like something from Mother Goose. Not a bit of
butter for supper," laughed Uncle Wiggily. "Not a bit of batter-butter
for the pitter-patter supper. If Peter Piper picked a pit of peckled
pippers--"

"Oh, don't start that!" begged Nurse Jane. "All I need is some supper
for butter--no some bupper for batter--oh, dear! I'll never get it
straight!" she cried.

"I'll say it for you," said Uncle Wiggily, kindly. "I know what you
want--some butter for supper. I'll go get it for you."

"Thank you," Nurse Jane exclaimed, and so the old rabbit gentleman
started off over the fields and through the woods for the butter store.

The monkey-doodle gentleman waited on him, and soon Uncle Wiggily was
on his way back to the hollow stump bungalow with the butter for
supper, and he was thinking how nice the carrot muffins would taste,
for Nurse Jane had promised to make some, and Uncle Wiggily was sort of
smacking his whiskers and twinkling his nose, when, all at once, he
heard some one in the woods calling:

"Uncle Wiggily! Oh, I say, Uncle Wiggily! Can't you stop for a moment
and say how-d'-do?"

"Why, of course, I can," answered the bunny, and, looking around the
corner of an old log, he saw Grandpa Whackum, the old beaver gentleman,
who lived with Toodle and Noodle Flat-tail, the beaver boys.

"Come in and sit down for a minute and rest yourself," invited Grandpa
Whackum.

"I will," said Uncle Wiggily. "And I'll leave my butter outside where
it will be cool," for Grandpa Whackum lived down in an underground
house, where it was so warm, in summer, that butter would melt.

Grandpa Whackum was a beaver, and he was called Whackum because he used
to whack his broad, flat tail on the ground, like beating a drum, to
warn the other beavers