and I often saw Lightfoot while his new ones were growing,"
retorted Jumper.

"All right! I'll believe anything that Lightfoot tells me if you
say it is true," declared Peter, who greatly admires his cousin,
Jumper. "Now tell me about those rags, Lightfoot. Please do."

Lightfoot couldn't resist that "please." "Those rags are what is
left of a kind of covering which protected the antlers while they
were growing, as I told you before," said he. "Very soon after
my old ones dropped off the new ones began to grow. They were
not hard, not at all like they are now. They were soft and very
tender, and the blood ran through them just as it does through
our bodies. They were covered with a sort of skin with hairs on
it like thin fur. The ends were not sharply pointed they now
are, but were big and rounded, like knobs. They were not like
antlers at all, and they made my head hot and were very
uncomfortable. That is why I hid away. They grew very fast, so
fast that every day I could see by looking at my reflection in
water that they were a little longer. It seemed to me sometimes
as if all my strength went into those new antlers. And I had to
be very careful not to hit them against anything. In the first
place it would have hurt, and in the second place it might have
spoiled the shape of them.

"When they had grown to the length you now see, they began to
shrink and grow hard. The knobs on the ends shrank until they
became pointed. As soon as they stopped growing the blood stopped
flowing up in them, and as they became hard they were no longer
tender. The skin which had covered them grew dry and split, and I