e content with the good things that he has?"

Peter Rabbit hurried along through the moonlight, stopping every few
minutes to sit up to look and listen. He heard the fierce hunting
call of Hooty the Owl way over in the Green Forest, so he felt sure
that at present there was nothing to fear from him. He knew that
since their return to the Green Meadows and the Green Forest, Granny
and Reddy Fox had kept away from Farmer Brown's, so he did not worry
about them.

All in good time Peter came to the young orchard. It was just as
Tommy Tit the Chickadee had told him. Peter hopped up to the nearest
peach tree and nibbled the bark. My, how good it tasted! He went all
around the tree, stripping off the bark. He stood up on his long
hind legs and reached as high as he could. Then he dug the snow away
and ate down as far as he could. When he could get no more tender
young bark, he went on to the next tree.

Now though Peter didn't know it, he was in the very worst kind of
mischief. You see, when he took off all the bark all the way around
the young peach tree he killed the tree, for you know it is on the
inside of the bark that the sap which gives life to a tree and makes
it grow goes up from the roots to all the branches. So when Peter
ate the bark all the way around the trunk of the young tree, he had
made it impossible for the sap to come up in the spring. Oh, it was
the worst kind of mischief that Peter Rabbit was in.

But Peter didn't know it, and he kept right on filling that big
stomach of his and enjoying it so much that he forgot to watch out
for danger. Suddenly, just as he had begun on another tree, a great
roar right behind him made him jump almost out of his skin. He knew
that voice, and without waiting to even look behind him, he started
for the stone wall on the other side of the orchard. Right at his
heels, his great mouth wide open, was Bowser the Hound.

CHAPTER XIV

_Farmer Brown Sets a Trap_

Peter Rabbit was in trouble. He had got into mischief and now, like
everyone who gets into mischief, he wished that he hadn't. The worst
of it was that he was a long way from his home in the dear Old
Briar-patch, and he didn't know how he ever could get back there
again. Where was he? Why, in the stone wall on one side of Farmer
Brown's young peach orchard. How Peter blessed the old stone wall in
which he had found a safe hiding-place! Bowser had hung around
nearly all night, so that Peter had not dared to