When your plans are upset and all scattered¹ about

Just make up your mind that you'll find a way out.

Peter rabbit went straight over to the old stone wall on the edge of the Old Orchard², lipperty-lipperty-lip so fast that it didn't take him long to get there. But Chatterer the Red Squirrel³ never feels really safe on the ground unless there is something to climb close at hand, so he went a long way round by way of the rail fence. He always did like to run along a rail fence, and he wouldn't have minded it a bit this [Pg 24]morning if he hadn't been in such a hurry. It seemed to him that he never would get there. But of course he did.

 

When he did get there, he found Peter Rabbit sitting on Johnny Chuck's doorstep, staring down Johnny Chuck's long hall. "They're asleep," said he, as Chatterer came up all out of breath. "I've thumped⁴ and thumped and thumped, but it isn't the least bit of use. They are asleep, and they'll stay asleep until Mistress⁵ Spring arrives. I can't understand it at all. No, Sir, I can't understand how anybody can be willing to miss this splendid cold weather."

 

Peter shook his head in a puzzled way and continued to stare down the long empty hall. Of course he was talking about Johnny and Polly Chuck, who had gone to sleep for the winter. That sleeping business always puzzles [Pg 25]Peter. It seems to him like a terrible waste of time. But Chatterer had too much on his mind to waste time wondering how other people could sleep all winter. He couldn't himself, and now that he had been driven away from his own home in the Green Forest by fear of Shadow the Weasel, he couldn't waste a minute. He must find a new home and then spend every minute of daytime laying up a new store of food for the days when everything would be covered with snow.

 

Up and down the length of the stone wall he scampered⁶, looking for a place to make a home, but nothing suited him. You know he likes best to make his home in a tree. He isn't like Striped

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