Now Striped Chipmunk and the Merry Little Breezes of Old Mother West Wind are great friends, very great friends, indeed.  Almost every morning they have a grand frolic together.  But this morning the Merry Little Breezes hadn’t come over to the old stone wall where Striped Chipmunk makes his home.  Anyway, they hadn’t come at the usual time.  Striped Chipmunk had waited a little while and then, because he was feeling so good, he had decided to take a run down the Long Lane to see if anything new had happened there.  That is how it happened that when one of the Merry Little Breezes did go to look for him, and was terribly anxious to ask him to come to the help of Grandfather Frog, he was nowhere to be found.

But Striped Chipmunk didn’t know anything about that.  He scampered along the top rails of the old fence, jumped up on top of a post, and sat up to wash his face and hands, for Striped Chipmunk is very neat and cannot bear to be the least bit dirty.  He looked up and winked at Ol’ Mistah Buzzard, sailing round and round way, way up in the blue, blue sky.  He chased his own tail round and round until he nearly fell off of the post.  He made a wry face in the direction of Redtail the Hawk, whom he could see sitting in the top of a tall tree way over on the Green Meadows.  He scolded Bowser the Hound, who happened to come trotting up the Long Lane, and didn’t stop scolding until Bowser was out of sight.  Then he kicked up his heels and whisked along the old fence again.

Half-way across a shaky old rail, he suddenly stopped.  His bright eyes had seen something that filled him with curiosity, quite as much curiosity as Peter Rabbit would have had.  It was a piece of string.  Yes, Sir, it was a piece of string.  Now Striped Chipmunk often had found pieces of string, so there was nothing particularly interesting in the string itself.  What did interest him and make him very curious was the fact that this piece of string kept moving.  Every few seconds it gave a little jerk.  Whoever heard of a piece of string moving all by itself?  Certainly Striped Chipmunk never had.  He couldn’t understand it.

For a few minutes he watched it from the top rail of the old fence.  Then he scurried down to the ground and, a few steps at a time, stopping to watch sharply between each little run, he drew nearer and nearer to that queer acting string.  It gave him a funny feeling inside to see a string acting like that, so he was very careful not to get too near.  He looked at it from one side, then ran around and looked at it from the other side.  At last he got where he could see that one end of the string was under an old board, and then he began to understand.  Of course there was somebody hiding under that old board and jerking the string.

[Illustration:  He seized the other end of the string and began to pull. Page 88.]