ge; a shiner may make a meal off one
without finding the skewer.

Hermit. Well, then, let's be off. Shall we to the Concord? There's good
sport there if the water be not too high.

Why do precisely these objects which we behold make a world? Why has
man just these species of animals for his neighbors; as if nothing but
a mouse could have filled this crevice? I suspect that Pilpay & Co. have
put animals to their best use, for they are all beasts of burden, in a
sense, made to carry some portion of our thoughts.

The mice which haunted my house were not the common ones, which are said
to have been introduced into the country, but a wild native kind not
found in the village. I sent one to a distinguished naturalist, and
it interested him much. When I was building, one of these had its nest
underneath the house, and before I had laid the second floor, and swept
out the shavings, would come out regularly at lunch time and pick up the
crumbs at my feet. It probably had never seen a man before; and it soon
became quite familiar, and would run over my shoes and up my clothes.
It could readily ascend the sides of the room by short impulses, like a
squirrel, which it resembled in its motions. At length, as I leaned
with my elbow on the bench one day, it ran up my clothes, and along my
sleeve, and round and round the paper which held my dinner, while I kept
the latter close, and dodged and played at bopeep with it; and when at
last I held still a piece of cheese between my thumb and finger, it came
and nibbled it, sitting in my hand, and afterward cleaned its face and
paws, like a fly, and walked away.

A phoebe soon built in my shed, and a robin for protection in a pine
which grew against the house. In June the partridge (Tetrao umbellus),
which is so shy a bird, led her brood past my windows, from the woods in
the rear to the front of my house, clucking and calling to them like a
hen, and in all her behavior proving herself the hen of the woods. The
young suddenly disperse on your approach, at a signal from the mother,
as if a whirlwind had swept them away, and they so exactly resemble the
dried leaves and twigs that many a traveler has placed his foot in the
midst of a brood, and heard the whir of the old bird as she flew off,
and her anxious calls and mewing, or seen her trail her wings to attract
his attention, without suspecting their neighborhood. The parent will
sometimes roll and spin round before you in such a dishabi