iment."

"I belong to the Billy Bunny Boy Scouts of Old Snake Fence Corner,"
replied the little rabbit. "I can't join your regiment." So he hopped
along and by and by he came to a big white swan that was sailing up
and down on a pond.

"Would you like to take a sail?" she asked, coming up close to the
bank. "Because if you would, just hop on my back and I'll take you
around the pond two times and maybe a half if you'll give me a
lollypop."

So the little rabbit opened his knapsack and gave her one and then he
hopped on her back and went for a lovely sail in and out among the
pond lilies and little green grass islands.

Well, everything was going along beautifully when, all of a sudden,
just like that, a big water snake came swimming by.

"Oh, don't let him swallow me," cried the little rabbit, and he took
his popgun out of his knapsack and stuck the cork in the end.

"I'll shoot you on the tail if you touch me," he cried just as bravely
as he could, but he nearly slipped off the swan's back just the same,
he was so frightened.

"Don't you come any nearer," said the swan with a fierce hiss, but the
snake didn't care. He swam around and around until the little rabbit
got so dizzy that he had to hold on to the swan's neck.

"Please swim around the other way," pleaded the little rabbit, "you
make me dreadfully dizzy." But the bad water snake said he wouldn't,
because that's just what he wanted Billy Bunny to be--so dizzy that he
would fall into the water and then that dreadful water snake could
swallow him and maybe a pond lily besides.

"Look here," said the swan, "if you don't stop making snakery circles
all around me, I'll bite your head off with my big, strong beak." And
then what do you think the little rabbit did? Why, he managed somehow
to lift up his gun and shoot it off, and the cork hit the water snake
on the end of the tail and gave him such a headache that he swam over
to the long grass and ate watercress salad and a piece of lemon pie.

And while he was doing that the swan took the little rabbit to the
other side of the pond and he hopped away so fast that he didn't tell
me what he was going to do in to-morrow's story.

STORY XV.

BILLY BUNNY AND THE PEACOCK.

Well, if it hadn't been for Robbie Redbreast who saw little Billy
Bunny hopping away from the lily pond, as I told you in the last
story, I never would have found out what he did after that, and so
there would have been no story t