replied. "Trees!" Having said those three
words he dashed off again even faster than before.

"Trees!" Master Meadow Mouse echoed. "I can't eat trees. I've never
eaten a tree in all my life. There must be something that my cousin
forgot to explain. So I suppose I'll have to run after him again and ask
him what he meant."

The fourth time that Master Meadow Mouse found his cousin he took no
chances. He caught his cousin by his tail and held on firmly.

"You're not going to get away from me till I've found out what I want
to know," he declared. "How can I eat a tree?" Master Meadow Mouse
demanded.

"You can't!" his cousin replied, struggling desperately to free himself,
for he was too busy to stop long.

"Then explain what you mean!" Master Meadow Mouse cried.

"Eat the bark!" his cousin answered.

Then--and not till then--did Master Meadow Mouse let him go.

Master Meadow Mouse chased his cousin no more, but hurried away to
Farmer Green's orchard, where he gnawed a ring all the way around one of
the young fruit trees, at the top of the snow. It was the first big meal
he had enjoyed for weeks. And he went home feeling that the winter was
not so hard as he had thought, after all.

But Farmer Green didn't agree with him. When he happened to go into the
orchard one day, later, and saw tree after tree ruined, he was very,
very much displeased.

"I ought to have put wire netting around those young trees," he told the
hired man. "This is what comes of a hard winter."

[Illustration]

[Illustration]

21

A Cold Dip

IN one way Peter Mink was like Master Meadow Mouse. He enjoyed swimming.
And he spent a great deal of his time along the streams that threaded
their way through Pleasant Valley. Sometimes Peter dawdled on the banks
of Swift River. Sometimes he lingered for days in the neighborhood of
Black Creek. Nor did he disdain so small a stream as the brook that
crossed the meadow. It was deep enough for a swim. And he knew that
muskrats lived under its banks. While as for meadow mice--well, Peter
Mink had surprised many a one swimming in the brook. If it hadn't been
for the meadow mice perhaps he wouldn't have visited the brook so often.

Even in winter Master Meadow Mouse just _had_ to have his cold dip now
and then. So he ran one of his many snow tunnels to the brook, making a
little opening that led under the ice, where the water had fallen away
and left a cavern. Just because there was skating f