Bunny shook his head.

“I didn’t dast do it,” he said.  “They might see me cutting ’em, and then they’d guess what we were going to do.  We can each take two blankets off our beds, Sue, and that will make the ground soft enough.  ’Sides, if we’re going to be campers, and sleep in the woods, we mustn’t mind a hard bed.  Soldiers don’t—­for daddy said so.”

“Girls aren’t soldiers!” said Sue.  “But I’ll come with you and we’ll sleep on two blankets.”

“To practice for when we go camping,” added Bunny.

Sue nodded her head, and, with her doll, went up to bed in the room next to Bunny’s.

“I just know those children are up to something,” said Mother Brown, as she came down after tucking in Bunny and Sue.  “I wish I knew what it was.”

“Oh, I guess it isn’t anything,” laughed daddy.

Sue and her brother found it hard to keep awake.  They had played hard all day, and that always makes children sleepy.

In fact, Bunny and Sue did fall asleep, but Bunny awakened sometime in the night, I suppose because he was thinking so much about going out into the tent.

The little fellow sat up in bed.  A light was burning out in the hall, so he could see plainly enough.  He remembered what he had promised to do—­wake up Sue by tickling her feet.

Softly he stole into her room, after putting on his bath robe.  He dragged after him two blankets from his bed.

Reaching under the covers he gently tickled Sue’s pink toes.

“What—­What’s matter?” murmured Sue, sleepily.

“Hush!” whispered Bunny close to her ear.  “Wake up, Sue!  I don’t want to tickle you any more, and make you sneeze.  We’re going to sleep out in the tent, you know.”

Sue was soon wide awake.  Softly she crawled out of bed, slipped on her bath robe, which was on a chair near her bed, and then, dragging two blankets after her, she and Bunny went softly down the stairs.

Carefully Bunny opened the door, and he and Sue went out on the side porch, and down across the lawn to where, in the moonlight, stood grandpa’s tent.

CHAPTER IV

SPLASH COMES, TOO

The camping tent, which had been put up by Daddy Brown, so it would be well dried out, stood wide open.  Bunny and Sue, with their bed-blankets trailing after them, slipped in through the “front door.”

Of course, there was not really a “front door” to a tent.  There are just two pieces of canvas, called “flaps,” that come together and make a sort of front door.  Between these white flaps Bunny Brown and his sister Sue went, and they found themselves inside the tent.

“It—­it’s awful dark, isn’t it, Bunny?” whispered Sue, softly.

“Hush!” returned her brother.  “We don’t want them to see us.  It will be light pretty soon, Sue.”

“I—­I don’t like it dark,” she said.