Tommy listened and slowly a smile widened. “Hooty didn’t get you after all!” he muttered. Then in a minute he added: “I’m glad of it. And you haven’t anything more to fear from me. You won’t believe it, but you haven’t. You may be mischievous, but I guess you have troubles enough without me adding to them. Oh, but I’m glad I’m not a squirrel! Being a boy’s good enough for me, ’specially ’long ’bout Christmas time. I guess Sis will be tickled with these greens. But it’s queer what happens when I sit down on this old rock!” He frowned at it as if he couldn’t understand it at all. Then he gathered up his load of greens, and, with the merriest of whistles, trudged homeward. And to this day Chatterer the Red Squirrel cannot understand how it came about that from that Christmas he and Tommy became fast friends. But they did. Perhaps the wishing-stone could tell if it would. CHAPTER THREE THE PLEASURES AND TROUBLES OF BOBBY COON Tommy was trudging down to the corn-field, and his freckled face was rather sober. At least it was sober for him, considering why he was on his way to the corn-field. It wasn’t to work. If it had been, his sober look would have been quite easy to understand. The fact is, Tommy was going on an errand that once would have filled him with joy and sent him whistling all the way. “Coons are raising mischief down in the corn! You’d better get your traps out and see if you can catch the thieving little rascals. Go down and look the ground over, and see what you think,” his father had said to him at noon that day. So here he was on his way to look for signs of Bobby Coon, and, if the truth were known, actually hoping that he wouldn’t find them! There had been a time when he would have been all excitement over his quest, and eager to find the tell-tale tracks where Bobby Coon went into and out of the corn-field. Then he would have hurried home for his traps in great glee, or instead would have planned to watch with his gun for Bobby that very night. But now he had no such feelings. Somehow, he had come to regard his little wild neighbors in a wholly different light. He no longer desired to do them harm. Ever since he had begun to learn what their real lives were like, by wishing himself one of them as he sat on the old wishing-stone, he had cared less and less to hunt and frighten them and more and more to try to make friends with them. His teacher would have said that he had a “sympathetic understanding” of them, and then probably would have had to explain to Tommy what that meant--that he knew just how they felt and had learned to look at things from their point of view. And it was true. He had put away his gun and traps. He no longer desired to kill. He liked to hunt for these little wild people as much as ever, perhaps more, but it was in order to make friends with them, and to find out more about their ways and habits, instead of to kill them.