“I’d like to see myself before I buy a hat like this,” went on Grandpa Goosey.  “I hope it doesn’t make me look too tall.”

“Here’s a spring of water over by this old stump,” spoke Uncle Wiggily.  “You can see yourself in that, for it is just like a looking glass.”

Grandpa Goosey leaned over to see how Uncle Wiggily’s tall, silk hat looked, when, all of a sudden, along came a puff of wind, caught the hat under the brim, and as Grandpa Goosey had no ears to hold it on his head (as the bunny uncle had) away sailed the hat up in the air, and it landed right in the top of a big, high tree.

“Oh, dear!” cried Uncle Wiggily.

“Oh, dear!” said Grandpa Goosey.  “I’m very sorry that happened.  Oh, dear!”

“It wasn’t your fault at all,” spoke Uncle Wiggily kindly.  “It was the wind.”

“But with your nice, new tall silk hat up in that high tree, how are we ever going to get it down,” asked the goose gentleman.

“I don’t know,” answered Uncle Wiggily.  “Let me think.”

So he thought for a minute or two, and then he said: 

“There are three ways by which we may get the hat down.  One is to ask the wind to blow it back to us, another is to climb up the tree and get the hat ourselves, and the third is to ask the tree to shake it down to us.  We’ll try the wind first.”

So Uncle Wiggily and Grandpa Goosey asked the wind that had blown the hat up in the top of the high tree to kindly blow it back again.  But the wind had gone far out to sea, and would not be back for a week.  So that way of getting the hat was of no use.

“Mr. High Tree, will you kindly shake my hat down to me?” begged Uncle Wiggily next.

“I would like to, very much,” the tree answered politely, “but I cannot shake when there is no wind to blow me.  We trees cannot shake ourselves, you know.  We can only shake when the wind blows us, and until the wind comes back I cannot shake.”

“Too bad!” said Uncle Wiggily.  “Then the only way left for us to do, Grandpa Goosey, is to climb the tree.”

But this was easier said than done, for neither a rabbit nor a goose gentleman is made for climbing up trees, though when he was a young chap Grandpa Goosey had flown up into little trees, and Uncle Wiggily had jumped over them.  But that was long, long ago.

Try as they did, neither the rabbit gentleman nor the goose gentleman could climb up after the tall silk hat.

“What are we going to do?” asked Grandpa Goosey.

“I don’t know,” replied Mr. Longears.  “I guess I’ll have to go get Billie or Johnnie Bushytail, the squirrel boys, to climb the tree for us.  Yes, that’s what I’ll do; and then I can get my hat.”

Uncle Wiggily started off through the woods to look for one of the Bushytail chaps, while Grandpa Goosey stayed near the tree, to catch the hat in case it should happen to fall by itself.