Little Joe Otter/Chapter 4
CHAPTER IV
PETER RABBIT LEARNS BY SITTING STILL
By sitting still may much be learned
And thus be useful knowledge earned.
Do you know that you can learn things by sitting perfectly still? You can. That is, you can if you use your eyes and use your ears and all the other senses that Old Mother Nature has given you. Peter Rabbit discovered it quite by accident. You know how curious he is. It seems as if his curiosity never can be satisfied.
On the day that Little Joe Otter invited him to call at his home and then promptly disappeared, Peter could think of nothing but that home, and wonder where it was. Whenever he got the chance he went over to the Green Forest to look for Little Joe and his home. He had hopped up and down the banks of the Laughing Brook until his feet ached, and he was just as wise as before.
At last one day, he sat down just a little way from a great big tree with spreading roots near the bank of a little pool in the Laughing Brook. He was tired. Also he was discouraged. "I don't believe Little Joe has a home at all," he muttered. Then, because he was tired, he squatted down in a little brown heap and closed his eyes. How long he slept Peter never knew. When he awoke it was very, very still there in the Green Forest. He felt rested and therefore in a better frame of mind. He decided he would sit there a little longer and enjoy his beautiful surroundings before going back to the dear Old Briar-patch.
Now when Peter sits perfectly still, he is very hard to see. He looks like nothing so much as a little brown heap of dead leaves, and that was the way he was looking then. But all the time he was watching this way and that way to see what he could discover. Quite without any warning at all there was a rustling of leaves between two of the roots of the old tree a little way off. Peter didn't have to turn his head to look. You see, his eyes are set so far back that he can see without turning his head. What he saw made him catch his breath and open his eyes wider than ever. What do you think it was? Why it was a little brown baby rolling and tumbling in the leaves!
Peter had never seen a baby like it before. While he was watching and wondering whose baby it could be, another joined it. They tumbled and rolled over each other. They played tug-of-war with a little stick, each holding one end. They made believe bite each other. It was very rough play, but the rougher it was the better they seemed to like it. Peter watched them for a long time. Then, because he had a cramp in one of his feet, he moved ever so little, and in doing so he rustled the leaves. Instantly the two brown babies disappeared as if the earth had swallowed them up. Peter waited, but they didn't appear again.
At last his curiosity proved too much for him. He hopped over to the spreading roots of the old tree and there was the nicest little doorway he had ever seen. He knew then where the two brown babies had disappeared.
"I wonder," muttered Peter, "whose babies those were. I wonder—" A sudden thought popped into his head. It made him jump right up in the air. "Do you suppose that those could have been Little Joe Otter's babies?" he exclaimed right out loud to nobody in particular. Then, because he was so full of his discovery, he scampered away to the dear Old Briar-patch to tell Mrs. Peter all about it.