WISE WORDS FROM A WISE BEAST Neither Rabbit, nor Chaik Jay, nor Chewee the Chickadee, nor all of them together could make Doctor say what he thought of Tommy Peele.
 
“No,” he insisted, “I haven’t made up my mind. It’s a safe rule for any beast to do as his kind have done before him, and I never knew any who made friends with a man.”
 
“Nor any man who wanted to be friends with a muskrat, either,” pleaded Nibble. “Tommy Peele’s different.”
 
“That’s the way with men,” said the doctor. “They’re always changing. Only the wild things stay the same.”
 
“What is Man, anyway?” Nibble asked. “He isn’t a bird and he isn’t a fish, and of course he isn’t a snake. But the bats, who came to my storm party in the cornstalk tent, said he couldn’t be a beast because he hadn’t any tail.”
 
“Nonsense!” snorted the doctor. “Tad Coon’s cousin, the bear, hasn’t any more tail than that. What did the bats think he was?”
 
“A kind of a frog,” said Nibble . “But Squirrel didn’t agree with them.”
 
“A frog! A frog! Had those bats ever seen a man, then? Or a frog, either? Eh?” And the doctor made such a face of that his whiskers up like a lot of long darning needles on Granny’s fat pin cushion. “Why, a frog is less than a beast and a man—well, there used to be a tale going around when I wasn’t much bigger than Chewee there that Man was to Mother Nature herself in the very First-Off Beginning.” The old muskrat sank his head back between his shoulders and half ............