-away
look in his eyes as if he were looking way back to the time he was to
tell about. At last, just as Peter Rabbit was beginning to lose patience
Mr. Quack began.

"It must be, Peter," said he, "that my
great-great-ever-so-great-grandfather lived just about the same time as
your great-great-ever-so-great-grandfather, way back in the days when
the world was young. Perhaps they knew each other. Perhaps they were
acquainted just as you and I are now. Anyway, according to what has been
handed down in the family, Grandfather Quack was very much such a
looking fellow as I am now, except in the matter of his bill and feet.
His bill was not broad like mine but more like the bills of other birds,
and his feet were like the feet of Mr. Grouse and Bob White. They were
made for scratching, and there was nothing between the toes. You see,
Old Mother Nature was experimenting. She made everybody a little
different from everybody else and then started them forth in the Great
World to shift for themselves and to find out what they really needed
that they hadn't got.

"Old Mr. Quack, my great-great-ever-so-great-grandfather, soon
discovered one thing, and that was that his legs were too short for him
to get around very fast. When he walked, everybody laughed at him. When
he tried to run, they laughed harder than ever. He didn't mind this so
very much, though he did a little. Nobody likes to be laughed at,
especially when it is because of something they cannot help. But what he
did mind was the fact that his neighbors could run about so much faster
than he that they got all the best of the food, and quite often he went
hungry.

"One day he happened to be sitting on the bank of the Smiling Pool,
thinking the matter over and wondering what he had best do, when Mr.
Fox stole up behind him and startled him so that he lost his balance and
tumbled down the bank into the water. This frightened him more than
ever, and he flapped about and squawked and squawked and flapped until
Mr. Fox nearly split his sides laughing at him. And when he was quite
out of breath, Mr. Quack discovered that he was making all this fuss for
nothing. He didn't sink, but floated on the water, and what was more the
water didn't get under his feathers at all. When he tried to walk, of
course he couldn't, and he had a funny feeling because his feet didn't
touch anything and felt so very useless. But he kept moving them back
and forth, and pretty soon he discovered th