the sun, hooked his
tail about the same little bush, and went to sleep again. The other Deep
Woods people looked at the way he did it, as if it was something new
that they had never seen before.

Mr. 'Coon said: "I think I'd like a little, just a little, of that
medicine; Mr. 'Possum's gift certainly would come handy at times."

Mr. Squirrel nodded.

Mr. Rabbit looked out over the Deep Nowhere, and said nothing at all.

A DEEP WOODS WAR

MR. 'COON TELLS A CURIOUS
STORY OF LOVE AND BATTLE

Once upon a time Mr. Dog came over to the Hollow Tree to spend the
evening with the 'Coon and 'Possum and the Old Black Crow, and pretty
soon other Deep Woods people dropped in, and everybody was passing the
time of day and feeling comfortable and happy in the good society of
those present. They talked about the weather, and how it seemed to be a
dry spring, and Mr. Rabbit said his garden was suffering, and Mr. Turtle
said he had never seen the Wide Blue Water so low at this season for a
hundred and nine or ten years. He couldn't remember just which it was,
but it was the year that Father Storm Turtle, who lives up in the Big
West Hills, and makes the thunder, was laid up with misery in his
shoulder, and Mother Storm had to run the thunder-works, and tend to
sick folks, too. Most people, Mr. Turtle said, believed that good, loud
thunder helps to shake the rain out of the clouds, and very likely it
was so, for the next spring, when Father Storm got well, he gave them
enough of it, and it rained so that the Wide Blue Water came up into the
Big Deep Woods as far as the Hollow Tree, which wasn't a Hollow Tree
then, but a good, sound oak only about four hundred years old,--his
Uncle Tom Turtle, who lived up by the Forks, having been just about that
old himself when it came up as a sapling.[5]

When Mr. Turtle got through, none of the Hollow Tree people said
anything at all, at first, for whenever Mr. Turtle mentioned how old he
was, and the great ages of many of his family, it seemed to them too
wonderful for words. But by and by Mr. Dog said that Mr. Turtle was very
likely right about the thunder making the rain, for he had heard Mr. Man
explain that the reason it was so dry this year was because there was a
great war going on, on the other side of the world, with big guns
roaring all day and night, and that the terrible jar and noise of those
guns kept it raining there steadily, so there was no rain left for this
side