For every one to go to school.

 

           Little Joe Otter¹.

 

Peter Rabbit could not keep away from the Green Forest. No, Sir, he couldn’t. He just couldn’t do it. You see, having discovered those two queer, brown babies under a big tree on the bank of the Laughing Brook², he just had to go back there every chance he could get to watch them. So, whenever he could, he slipped over there to watch. He kept as still as still could be, and not once did those little brown babies suspect that he was near. Every day they came out to play, but at the least sound they would disappear in that snug³ home, the doorway⁴ of which was between the roots of the big tree.

 

After a little Peter discovered that there was a school in the Green Forest, just as there was a school at Johnny Chuck’s home in the Old Orchard⁵, and another where Danny Meadow Mouse had his home on the Green Meadows. You see, wherever there are babies there has to be a school. This is one of the laws of Old Mother Nature. Peter had been quite right when he had guessed that these babies were the children of Little Joe Otter. At first they seemed to do nothing but tumble over each other and play; it was very rough play, the roughest play, that Peter ever had seen. He didn’t guess that in that play those two brown babies were learning something, but they were. They were learning how to use their legs and teeth and bodies.

 

At first Peter had seen nothing of Little Joe Otter or Mrs. Joe, but he noticed that at the least rustle⁶ of a leaf the two brown babies disappeared in their home, and by this he knew that they had been taught that great law of all the little wild people, which is that safety is the first and most important lesson to be learned.

 

Then one morning he saw Mrs. Joe out with the two babies, and they were having a grand frolic. Mrs. Joe would get hold of one end of a stick and the two little

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