to die out under the
sugar-pot! As the significance of this dawned upon him, his keen
woodsman's eyes seemed to detect through the dark a shape of thicker
blackness gliding past the shack and into the woods. At the same
moment Jake growled, barked shortly, and dashed past him, with the
hair bristling along his neck.

The man's blood went to ice, as he sprang to the door of the shack,
crying in a terrible voice: "Mandy! Mandy! Where are--" But before
the question was out of his mouth, the door leaped open, and Mandy was
on his neck, shaking and sobbing.

"The children?" she gasped.

"Why, _they're_ all right, mother!" replied the man cheerfully. "It
was only the barn--an' they got the critters out all safe! But what's
wrong here? An' what's kep' you? An' didn't you--"

But he was not allowed to finish his questionings, for the woman was
crying and laughing and strangling him with her wild clasp. "Oh,
Dave!" she managed to exclaim. "It was the bear--as tried to git
us--all night long! An' he's et up every crum of the last bilin'."

THE RETURN OF THE MOOSE

"TO the best of my knowledge, ther' ain't been no moose seen this side
the river these eighteen year back."

The speaker, a heavy-shouldered, long-legged backwoodsman, paused in
his task of digging potatoes, leaned on the handle of his broad-tined
digging fork, and bit off a liberal chew from his plug of black
tobacco. His companion, digging parallel with him on the next row,
paused sympathetically, felt in his trousers' pocket for his own plug
of "black jack," and cast a contemplative eye up the wide brown slope
of the potato-field toward the ragged and desolate line of burnt woods
which crested the hill.

The woods, a long array of erect, black, fire-scarred rampikes,
appeared to scrawl the very significance of solitude against the
lonely afternoon sky. The austerity of the scene was merely heightened
by the yellow glow of a birch thicket at the further upper corner of
the potato-field, and by the faint tints of violet light that flowed
over the brown soil from a pallid and fading sunset. As the sky was
scrawled by the gray-and-black rampikes, so the slope was scrawled by
zigzag lines of gray-and-black snake fence, leading down to three log
cabins, with their cluster of log barns and sheds, scattered
irregularly along a terrace of the slope. A quarter of a mile further
down, beyond the little gray dwellings, a sluggish river wound between
alder swa