FARMER DADDY LONGLEGS
Now, let me see where we left off in the last story. Oh, yes, I remember now. It was just as the trolley car bell rang on the way to Bunnybridge.
“What’s the matter?” asked Squirrel Nutcracker, for the car stopped so suddenly that his hat came off. And then they heard the motorman, who was a billy goat, say:
And who do you suppose was driving the load of hay? Why, it was Old Farmer Daddy Longlegs. He was sitting on top and saying giddap to a pair of little field mice.
“I’m very sorry, Mr. Motorman,” answered Farmer Daddy Longlegs. “Just wait a minute and I’ll get off the track.”
And then he turned the little mice to the right, and when the trolley car went by it pulled off some of the hay and it fell into the open window and covered Mrs. Duck’s new bonnet, with the yellow roses on it.
“I’ll make a wish, for every time you pass a load of hay you must make a wish, you know, and if you don’t tell anybody it will surely come true,” she said with a quack.
Well, by and by, after a while, they came to Clover River, and as the trolley car couldn’t swim it went over the bridge, and in less than five hundred short seconds it stopped in Bunnybridge, on the corner of Cookey Street and Cocoanut Avenue.
“Last stop. All out,” shouted the billy goat conductor, so all the passengers left by the front door, for there was a big sign in the car which said:
But, oh, dear me. Just as Little Jack Rabbit hopped to the sidewalk a deep, growly voice said:
“Oh, please don’t,” cried the little rabbit. “Please, Mr. Wicked Wolf, let me go just this once.” And unless Mr. Wicked Wolf gets dreadfully hungry all of a sudden, you shall hear what happened after that.