“Way back in the First-Off Beginning,” said Doctor impressively, “there was one of the Things-from-under-the-Earth who really wanted to be good——”  
“The !” exclaimed Rabbit. “Wasn’t it?”
 
“Was it?” asked Stripes Skunk.
 
Doctor Muskrat didn’t answer right away. He sat there his whiskers with a clammy wet paw to hide a smile, and his little eyes were twinkling. “I was just wondering,” he went on at last, “whether they still tell this story in your family or whether you made up your mind on your own account.”
 
“On my own account,” owned Stripes truthfully. “I got scared at what the little told me after you found out I’d been making trouble for Tad Coon. And I got to thinking. Then it seemed as if I just had to try how it would be to live so nice and peaceful—the way you want it.” He was squirming a in his paw and down his pointy nose, looking very much ashamed of himself.
 
“Ah,” cried Doctor Muskrat in a delighted voice. “That’s exactly the story of the First Skunk in the First-Off Beginning. He was bad—just as bad as all the other Things-from-under-the-Earth. He went running around, making all the trouble he could, while Mother Nature was away fixing up the other half of the world and this half all went wrong again. You remember, Nibble, how the sun and the wind and the rain didn’t take care of things the way she’d ordered them to, so winter came, and the plants hid in the earth and wouldn’t be eaten, and her very own new creatures got so terrible starvation hungry that some of them took to eating each other—like the wolves ate the cows.
 
“All the Things-from-under-the-Earth wore scales in the First-Off Beginning. When winter came most of them went right back under the earth and they stayed , and are to this very day. But some of them found it was so easy to Mother Nature’s poor starved new creatures they couldn’t bear to stop eating them. They didn’t bother picking their poor lean bones; they just ate the tender parts that weren’t so starvation thin—like brains. They drank blood, and it went to their heads, so at last they killed for the sheer fun of .”
 
“Like the Weasel,” nodded Stripes knowingly.
 
“Like some of Mother Nature’s own creatures, the wildcats and the wolves,” said Doctor Muskrat. “And they didn’t care a bit who they were killing, either. If the Things-from-under-the-Earth came near they took after them. They took after the First Skunk whenever they came across him—you’d better believe he was scared! The ground was so frozen by that time that he couldn’t dig down into it. So he hid in a hollow tree, with nothing but his scales on, and he was terribly cold and and unhappy. And that was the first thing that set him to thinking.”
 
“Think of being in a windy tree with nothing but a clammy coat of scales on,” said Nibble, his teeth almost . “Sometimes it’s bad enough in the Pickery Things, and they surely keep the wind off.”
 
“Well, he didn’t suffer very long,” went on the old doctor. “The first thing Mother Nature said was, ‘Any one can have fur that wants it.’ Now she didn’t say ‘my own creatures,’ nor she didn’t say ‘except the Bad Ones’—she just said ‘any one.’ And there was the First Skunk in a nice warm suit of fur, looking like any of her own things, except that his earholes were so far over the sides of his head his ears came too low down—and so did those of all the Things-from-under-the-Earth; that’s one way you can always tell them. And he was so happy. He said to himself, ‘This is all I wanted,’ and he curled right up tight and fell fast asleep.
 
“But when he woke up he began to think again. And by this time he could think of several things he wanted. So he started out to find how he’d get them. And it didn’t take him long to discover that he got his fur because Mother Nature gave it to him; or to learn not to hunt her up where she was busy trying to put things in order in this half of the world again.
 
“She was ............