"Ha, ha, ha! Ho, ho, ho! Smarty caught at last!" Sammy Jay fairly shrieked¹ with glee, as he peered down from the top of an apple-tree at Chatterer, in the cage Farmer Brown's boy had made for him. Sammy was so relieved to think that Chatterer was not dead, and he was so tickled² to think that Chatterer, who always thought himself so smart, should have been caught, that he just had to torment³ Chatterer by laughing at him and saying mean things to him, until Chatterer lost his temper and said things back quite in the old way. This tickled Sammy more than ever, for it sounded so exactly [Pg 89]like Chatterer when he had been a free little imp⁴ of mischief⁵ in the Green Forest, that Sammy felt sure that Chatterer had nothing the matter with him.

 

But he couldn't stop very long to make fun of poor Chatterer. In the first place Farmer Brown's boy had put his head out the barn door to see what all the fuss was about. In the second place, Sammy fairly ached all over to spread the news through the Green Forest and over the Green Meadows. You know he is a great gossip. And this was such unusual news. Sammy knew very well that no one would believe him. He knew that they just couldn't believe that smart Mr. Chatterer had really been caught. And no one did believe it.

 

"All right," Sammy would reply. "It doesn't make the least bit of difference [Pg 90]in the world to me whether you believe it or not. You can go up to Farmer Brown's house and see him in prison yourself, just as I did."

 

So late that afternoon, when all was quiet around the farmyard, Chatterer saw something very familiar behind the old stone wall at the edge of the Old Orchard⁶. It bobbed up and then dropped out of sight again. Then it bobbed up again, only to drop out of sight just as quickly.

 

"It looks to me very much as if Peter Rabbit is over there and feeling very nervous," said Chatterer to himself, and then he called sharply, just as when he was free in the Green Forest. Right away Peter's head bobbed up for all the world like a jack-in-the-box, and this time it stayed up. Peter's eyes were round with surprise, as he stared across at Chatterer's prison.

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