“No, nothing like that,” Nurse Jane said.  “But we haven’t any butter!”

“No butter?” spoke Uncle Wiggily, sort of puzzled like, and abstracted.

“Not a bit of butter for supper,” went on Nurse Jane, sadly.

“Ha!  That sounds like something from Mother Goose.  Not a bit of butter for supper,” laughed Uncle Wiggily.  “Not a bit of batter-butter for the pitter-patter supper.  If Peter Piper picked a pit of peckled pippers—­”

“Oh, don’t start that!” begged Nurse Jane.  “All I need is some supper for butter—­no some bupper for batter—­oh, dear!  I’ll never get it straight!” she cried.

“I’ll say it for you,” said Uncle Wiggily, kindly.  “I know what you want—­some butter for supper.  I’ll go get it for you.”

“Thank you,” Nurse Jane exclaimed, and so the old rabbit gentleman started off over the fields and through the woods for the butter store.

The monkey-doodle gentleman waited on him, and soon Uncle Wiggily was on his way back to the hollow stump bungalow with the butter for supper, and he was thinking how nice the carrot muffins would taste, for Nurse Jane had promised to make some, and Uncle Wiggily was sort of smacking his whiskers and twinkling his nose, when, all at once, he heard some one in the woods calling: 

“Uncle Wiggily!  Oh, I say, Uncle Wiggily!  Can’t you stop for a moment and say how-d’-do?”

“Why, of course, I can,” answered the bunny, and, looking around the corner of an old log, he saw Grandpa Whackum, the old beaver gentleman, who lived with Toodle and Noodle Flat-tail, the beaver boys.

“Come in and sit down for a minute and rest yourself,” invited Grandpa Whackum.

“I will,” said Uncle Wiggily.  “And I’ll leave my butter outside where it will be cool,” for Grandpa Whackum lived down in an underground house, where it was so warm, in summer, that butter would melt.

Grandpa Whackum was a beaver, and he was called Whackum because he used to whack his broad, flat tail on the ground, like beating a drum, to warn the other beavers of danger.  Beavers, you know, are something like big muskrats, and they like water.  Their tails are flat, like a pancake or egg turner.

“Well, how are things with you, and how is Nurse Jane?” asked Grandpa Whackum.

“Oh, everything is fine,” said Uncle Wiggily.  “Nurse Jane is well.  I’ve just been to the store to get her some butter.”

“That’s just like you; always doing something for some one,” said Grandpa Whackum, pleased like.

Then the two friends talked for some little while longer, until it was almost 6 o’clock, and time for Uncle Wiggily to go.

“I’ll take my butter and travel along,” he said.  But when he went outside, where he had left the pound of butter on a flat stump, it wasn’t there.

“Why, this is queer,” said the bunny uncle.  “I wonder if Nurse Jane could have come along and taken it to the hollow stump bungalow herself?”