“I guess my Uncle Oscar knows,” said Wampus, ready to get mad in a minute at anybody that said his Uncle Oscar did not know. “He told me, and he told Sue, and that’s why she said so. He was over in the Illinois bottom land last spring, when the river was high, rowing around in a skiff, and he saw a rabbit in a tree. It had climbed there. Uncle Oscar said so.” “I don’t want to dispute any conclusion your Uncle Oscar drew from the fact that a rabbit was in a tree, Wampus,” said Jibby Jones, “but couldn’t it have been a squirrel? Squirrels climb trees.” Tad shouted. It was too funny to see Jibby sitting there like a wise old owl telling us that squirrels climb trees. He might as well have said water was wet, we knew it so well. “Aw!” said Wampus; “I guess my uncle knows a rabbit from a squirrel. It was a rabbit. It was a regular cottontail.” Jibby blinked his eyes and thought this over. “Perhaps it didn’t climb the tree,” he said. “Perhaps the water had been higher and the rabbit had been floating on a board and hopped off the board into the tree, and then the water went down and left the rabbit in the tree. Then, if your uncle saw a rabbit high up in the tree, he might have thought it had climbed there.” “No,” said Wampus, “because the water was as high then as it had been; it was higher than it had been.” “Did your uncle see the rabbit climb the tree?” Jibby Jones asked. “No, it was there when he saw it,” said Wampus. “It was high up in the tree; twice as high as he could reach from his boat. He said it was the first tree-climbing rabbit he had seen, but that he understood just what had happened. The river had come up and surrounded the rabbit and the tree, and as the river got higher there was no place for the rabbit to go but up the tree. It just had to climb, so it climbed. So rabbits do climb trees. Because my uncle doesn’t tell lies, and I can lick any two that say he does.” That seemed reasonable to me. I thought Wampus had proved it pretty well, and so did Tad and Skippy. When an uncle sees a rabbit up a tree and that uncle don’t lie and his nephew can lick any two that say he does lie, it seems a pretty sure thing that rabbits do climb trees. We admitted it. Tad and Skippy and I admitted it, but Jibby Jones was not that sort of admitter. “It may be so,” he said, “because a lot of things that do not seem so are so. I never thought crabs could climb trees until father took me to Tahiti. I saw crabs climb trees and throw down coconuts there.” “Oh, come off!” Wampus laughed. We all laughed. “But I did,” said Jibby. “They climb trees and pick the coconuts, and throw them down, to break them open. And if the coconuts don’t break open, they carry them up the trees again and drop them again, until they do break.” We thought he was trying to fool us, but he was as sober as a judge. Of course, we didn’t believe him; not until I asked my father and he said it was true. Then I had to.