m, they enjoyed seeing him tormented by Blacky and his relatives. But
all the time they took the greatest care to keep out of sight
themselves. Peter Rabbit was there. So was Jumper the Hare and Happy
Jack the Gray Squirrel and Chatterer the Red Squirrel and Whitefoot the
Wood Mouse and Striped Chipmunk and a lot more. Of course, Sammy Jay was
there, but Sammy didn't try to keep out of sight. Oh, my, no! He joined
right in with the Crows, calling Hooty all sorts of bad names and flying
about just out of reach in the most impudent way. You see he knew just
how helpless Hooty was.

Hooty was very, very angry. He hissed, and he snapped his bill, and he
told his tormentors what he would do to them if he caught them after
dark. And all the time he kept turning his head with its great, round,
glaring, yellow eyes so as not to give his tormentors a chance to pull
out any of his feathers, as the boldest of them tried to do. Now Hooty
can turn his head as no one else can. He can turn it so that he looks
straight back over his tail, so that his head looks as if it were put on
the wrong way. Then he can snap it around in the other direction so
quickly that you can hardly see him do it, and sometimes it seems as if
he turned his head clear around.

That interested Peter Rabbit immensely. He couldn't think of anything
else. He kept trying to do the same thing himself, but of course he
couldn't. He could turn his head sideways, but that was all. He puzzled
over it all the rest of the day, and that night, when his cousin, Jumper
the Hare, called at the dear Old Briar-patch, the first thing he did was
to ask a question.

"Cousin Jumper, do you know why it is that Hooty the Owl can turn his
head way around, and nobody else can?"

"Of course I know," replied Jumper. "I thought everybody knew that. It's
because his eyes are fixed in their sockets, and he can't turn them. So
he turns his whole head in order to see in all directions. The rest of
us can roll our eyes, but Hooty can't."

Peter scratched his long left ear with his long right hindfoot, a way he
has when he is thinking or is puzzled. "That's funny," said he. "I
wonder why his eyes are fixed."

"Because his great-great-ever-so-great-grandfather rolled his eyes too
much," replied Jumper, yawning. "He saw too much. It's a bad thing to
see too much."

"Tell me about it. Please do, Cousin Jumper," begged Peter.

Jumper looked up at the moon to see what time of night it was.