same tranquil air of owning the earth. The
moonlight, shining full upon it, showed its pointed nose, and two
broad, white stripes running down the black fur of its back.

The stranger reached the opening in the fence about three seconds
ahead of the porcupine. And this time the porcupine was the one to
defer. He did not like it. He grunted angrily, and his deadly spines
stood up. But he drew aside, and avoided giving any offence to so
formidable an acquaintance. No foot of ground would his sturdy courage
yield to bob-cat, bear, or man; but of a skunk he was afraid. When the
skunk had passed through the fence, and wandered off to hunt for eggs
under the barn, the porcupine turned and went all the way around the
fowl-house. Then he struck down through the back of the garden, gained
the rail fence enclosing the corn-field, and at length, whether by
intention, or because the fence, a convenient promenade, led him to
it, he came back to the leaning poplar. With a pleasant memory drawing
him on, he climbed the tree once more. The round moon was getting low
now, and the shadows she cast out across the corn were long and weird.
But the downpour of her light was still mysterious in its clarity, and
in its sheen the porcupine, rolled up like a bird's nest, swung
himself luxuriously to sleep.

The Truce

Too early, while yet the snow was thick and the food scarce, the big
black bear had roused himself from his long winter sleep and forsaken
his snug den under the roots of the pine-tree. The thawing spring
world he found an empty place, no rabbits to be captured, no roots to
be dug from wet meadows; and his appetite was sorely vexing him. He
would have crept back into his hole for another nap; but the air was
too stimulatingly warm, too full of promise of life, to suffer him to
resume the old, comfortable drowsiness. Moreover, having gone to bed
thin the previous December, he had waked up hungry; and hunger is a
restless bedfellow. In three days he had had but one meal--a big
trout, clawed out half-dead from a rocky eddy below the Falls; and
now, as he sniffed the soft, wet air with fiercely eager nostrils, he
forgot his customary tolerance of mood and was ready to do battle with
anything that walked the wilderness.

It was a little past noon, and the shadows of the tree-tops fell blue
on the rapidly shrinking snow. The air was full of faint trickling
noises, and thin tinklings where the snow veiled the slopes of little