abominable inventions.

I hung the trap to a low limb of the cedar, with a note in its
jaws telling Johnnie to come and see me next day. He came at dusk,
shamefaced, and I read him a lecture on fair play and the difference
between a thieving mink and an honest partridge. But he chuckled over
the bluejay, and I doubted the withholding power of a mere lecture; so,
to even matters, I hinted of an otter slide I had discovered, and of
a Saturday afternoon tramp together. Twenty times, he told me, he had
tried to snare the old beech partridge. When he saw the otter slide he
forswore traps and snares for birds; and I left the place, soon after,
with good hopes for the grouse, knowing that I had spiked the guns of
his most dangerous enemy.

Years later I crossed the old pasture and went straight to the bullbrier
tangle. There were tracks of a grouse in the snow,--blunt tracks that
rested lightly on the soft whiteness, showing that Nature remembered his
necessity and had caused his new snowshoes to grow famously. I hurried
to the brook, a hundred memories thronging over me of happy days and
rare sights when the wood folk revealed their little secrets. In the
midst of them--kwit! kwit! and with a thunder of wings a grouse whirred
away, wild and gray as the rare bird that lived there years before. And
when I questioned a hunter, he said: "That ol' beech pa'tridge? Oh, yes,
he's there. He'll stay there, too, till he dies of old age; 'cause you
see, Mister, there ain't nobody in these parts spry enough to ketch
'im."

FOLLOWING THE DEER

I was camping one summer on a little lake--Deer Pond, the natives called
it--a few miles back from a quiet summer resort on the Maine coast.
Summer hotels and mackerel fishing and noisy excursions had lost their
semblance to a charm; so I made a little tent, hired a canoe, and moved
back into the woods.

It was better here. The days, were still and long, and the nights full
of peace. The air was good, for nothing but the wild creatures breathed
it, and the firs had touched it with their fragrance. The faraway surge
of the sea came up faintly till the spruces answered it, and both sounds
went gossiping over the hills together. On all sides were the woods,
which, on the north especially, stretched away over a broken country
beyond my farthest explorations.

Over against my tenting place a colony of herons had their nests in some
dark hemlocks. They were interesting as a camp of gypsies,