cold all the wild creatures become outlaws, and roam abroad
beyond their usual haunts. The partridge comes to the orchard for buds;
the rabbit comes to the garden and lawn; the crows and jays come to
the ash-heap and corn-crib, the snow-buntings to the stack and to
the barn-yard; the sparrows pilfer from the domestic fowls; the pine
grosbeak comes down from the north and shears your maples of their buds;
the fox prowls about your premises at night, and the red squirrels find
your grain in the barn or steal the butternuts from your attic. In fact,
winter, like some great calamity, changes the status of most creatures
and sets them adrift. Winter, like poverty, makes us acquainted with
strange bedfellows.

For my part, my nearest approach to a strange bedfellow is the little
gray rabbit that has taken up her abode under my study floor. As she
spends the day here and is out larking at night, she is not much of a
bedfellow after all. It is probable that I disturb her slumbers more
than she does mine. I think she is some support to me under there-a
silent wild-eyed witness and backer; a type of the gentle and harmless
in savage nature. She has no sagacity to give me or lend me, but that
soft, nimble foot of hers, and that touch as of cotton wherever she
goes, are worthy of emulation. I think I can feel her good-will through
the floor, and I hope she can mine. When I have a happy thought I
imagine her ears twitch, especially when I think of the sweet apple
I will place by her doorway at night. I wonder if that fox chanced to
catch a glimpse of her the other night when he stealthily leaped over
the fence near by and walked along between the study and the house?
How clearly one could read that it was not a little dog that had passed
there. There was something furtive in the track; it shied off away from
the house and around it, as if eying it suspiciously; and then it had
the caution and deliberation of the fox--bold, bold, but not too bold;
wariness was in every footprint. If it had been a little dog that
had chanced to wander that way, when he crossed my path he would have
followed it up to the barn and have gone smelling around for a bone; but
this sharp, cautious track held straight across all others, keeping five
or six rods from the house, up the hill, across the highway towards
a neighboring farmstead, with its nose in the air and its eye and ear
alert, so to speak.

A winter neighbor of mine in whom I am interested, an