Peter Rabbit sat in his secret place in the middle of the Old Briar-patch. Peter was doing some very hard thinking. He ought to have been asleep, for he had been out the whole night long. But instead of sleeping, he was wide awake and thinking and thinking.
 
You see early the night before Boomer the Nighthawk had told Peter that Sammy Jay was up in the far-away Old Pasture. Boomer had seen him going to bed there and had come straight down to tell Peter. This was great news, and Peter could hardly wait for Boomer to stop talking, he was so anxious to spread the news over the Green Meadows and through the Green Forest, for Peter is a great gossip and cannot keep his tongue still.
 
So he had hurried this way and that way, telling every one he met how Sammy
Jay had moved away to the Old Pasture. But no one believed him.
 
"Wait and see! Wait and see!" said Jimmy Skunk.
 
"It's just a trick," said Bobby Coon.
 
"But Boomer the Nighthawk saw him up there going to bed and talked with him!" cried Peter Rabbit.
 
"Perhaps he did and then again perhaps he didn't," replied Bobby Coon, carefully washing an ear of sweet milky corn that he had brought down to the Laughing Brook from Farmer Brown's corn-field, for Bobby Coon is very, very neat and always washes his food before eating. "For my part," he continued, "I believe that Boomer the Nighthawk ju............