ime two other fishermen who had been
before him were watching him and chuckling to themselves. They were
Little Joe Otter and Buster Bear.
VIII
FARMER BROWN'S BOY FEELS HIS HAIR RISE
'Twas just a sudden odd surprise
Made Farmer Brown's boy's hair to rise.
That's a funny thing for hair to do--rise up all of a sudden--isn't it?
But that is just what the hair on Farmer Brown's boy's head did the day
he went fishing in the Laughing Brook and had no luck at all. There are
just two things that make hair rise--anger and fear. Anger sometimes
makes the hair on the back and neck of Bowser the Hound and of some
other little people bristle and stand up, and you know the hair on the
tail of Black Pussy stands on end until her tail looks twice as big as
it really is. Both anger and fear make it do that. But there is only one
thing that can make the hair on the head of Farmer Brown's boy rise, and
as it isn't anger, of course it must be fear.
It never had happened before. You see, there isn't much of anything that
Farmer Brown's boy is really afraid of. Perhaps he wouldn't have been
afraid this time if it hadn't been for the surprise of what he found.
You see when he had found the heads of those trout on the bank he knew
right away that some one else had been fishing, and that was why he
couldn't catch any; but it didn't seem possible that little Billy Mink
could have eaten all those trout, and Farmer Brown's boy didn't once
think of Little Joe Otter, and so he was very, very much puzzled.
He was turning it all over in his mind and studying what it could mean,
when he came to a little muddy place on the bank of the Laughing Brook,
and there he saw something that made his eyes look as if they would pop
right out of his head, and it was right then that he felt his hair rise.
Anyway, that is what he said when he told about it afterward. What was
it he saw? What do you think? Why, it was a footprint in the soft mud.
Yes, Sir, that's what it was, and all it was. But it was the biggest
footprint Farmer Brown's boy ever had seen, and it looked as if it had
been made only a few minutes before. It was the footprint of Buster
Bear.
Now Farmer Brown's boy didn't know that Buster Bear had come down to the
Green Forest to live. He never had heard of a Bear being in the Green
Forest. And so he was so surprised that he had hard work to believe his
own eyes, and he had a queer feeling all over,--a little chilly feeling,
a
|