Twinkly Eyes had his mind all made up, as he hid there in the shadow of the tree trunk, to add a rabbit to his feast of honey.

He therefore crouched with his great steel paw ready to give the one crushing blow that would be necessary the moment the first brown bunny was so foolish as to pass within his reach.

He watched gleefully as he saw their sleek brown forms dancing so care-free in the moonlight. “Hippity skip and away we go!” their soft feet seemed to sing, as they galloped back and forth across a fallen log.

Saucy fellows, he told himself, as they flapped their long brown ears or leaped high in the air.

Oddly enough, so silently had the little Bear approached that not one of the outposts was aware of his presence. The wind was blowing directly toward him, so that they did not even get his scent.

Only Mammy Cottontail, prancing gaily around to the right, thought for just an instant that she had caught an alien odor. Leaping high in the moonlight, she struck her long hind feet three times upon the ground, to see if she could startle whatever it was into betraying its whereabouts.

At her danger signal, every bunny in the glade stopped stone still to stare and listen; but Twinkly Eyes was not to be thus betrayed. He was too big to be startled by her stamping, and too wise to come out into the open, where every rabbit, once warned, could easily outrun him.

Not he! Twinkly Eyes just bided his time, huddled down as still as any frightened field mouse. He sat so long in one position that his legs got cramped and he began to feel distinctly drowsy. Why on earth didn’t one of those fat bunnies come just a wee bit closer? How weird they looked, now chasing one another, now pausing to nibble a few grasses, but always well within the open glade where the moon would have shown them the first instant an intruder thrust a paw within the charm-ed circle.

After a while, though, the wind died down, and with the bear scent that now suddenly came to the merrymakers, there was a series of frightened squeaks, and in less time than the twinkle of a moonbeam, every last bunny of them had darted under the ferns or into the deep shadows, and the little glade was as empty as if they had never been there.

Then Wriggly Nose, more daring than the others, crept very, very silently toward that dreadful odor. He peered amazed at what he saw.

Twinkly Eyes had fallen fast asleep.