"_You_ ordered me?" said Jimmy Rabbit, acting as if he were astonished.

"Yes!" Henrietta declared. "And I'd like to know when you're going to
obey me."

"It's easy to answer that," Jimmy Rabbit replied. "I'm going away as soon
as I've finished my luncheon." Nobody could have been pleasanter than he.
Yet Henrietta Hen seemed determined to be disagreeable.

"I don't see your lunch basket," she remarked, looking all around.

"No!" he replied. "I forgot it. I meant to bring one with me and carry a
cabbage-head home in it."

Henrietta Hen spoke as if she were very peevish.

"You've no right," she said, "to take one of the cabbages away with you."

"I'm not going to," Jimmy Rabbit explained.

"You were nibbling at one when I first noticed you," Henrietta Hen
insisted.

"Was I?" he gasped. "Are you sure you're not mistaken? Are you sure you
weren't pecking at a cabbage-leaf yourself?"

Now, the truth of the matter was that Henrietta had herself come to the
garden to eat cabbage. Really she was no better than he was. But somehow
Henrietta Hen never could believe that she was in the wrong.