there on the left.

Dot was not in the least afraid at being alone, but she did wish she was
hungry enough to eat some more berries.

She thought of it, and she tried to, but it was of no use, for all the
while she had been picking she had put one berry in her rosy little
mouth every time she had put another in her little tin pail.

"Oh, so much berries!" sighed Dot. "They're all our berries, too."

Yes, and Mrs. Calliper meant to dry them all and sell them, and buy some
things for Dot and Molly and the baby. Bob had said that he meant to
sell his own berries and buy him a new gun.

Want of appetite was the trouble with Dot; but there was somebody else
in there, among the thickest of those bushes, picking, picking, picking,
and eating every one he picked, and that fellow had never seen an hour
in all his life when he could not have eaten some more blackberries.

An enormous fellow he was, and fatter for his size than Dot Calliper was
for hers. He did not look at all ill-natured, and there was even a sort
of funny twinkle in his little black eyes, as he pulled the branches
full of fruit to his mouth with his great clumsy-looking paws.

They were not half so clumsy as they looked, and they were armed with
long, sharp, cruel claws that were bent in a curve, like the teeth of
the big shell comb Dot's mother bought of the peddler for her back hair.
Then, too, when his mouth opened wide, as it did when he made one of his
lazy, sleepy yawns, the teeth he showed were something dreadful to look
at. Teeth of that size were never needed for eating such things as
blackberries. They looked a great deal more as if they were meant for
eating Dot Callipers.

He was evidently very fond of berries, and did not seem to have any
doubt but what they all belonged to him. It was just as if he had
offered a prize that summer for the bush that would bear the most
blackberries, and was now going around among them to see which had won
it. Every bush he came to just held out its branches for him to look at;
but if Dot had been watching him, she would have seen at once that the
fat old rascal never seemed to count the berries at all, but just
gathered and swallowed them. How would he be able to tell, when he was
done, which bush had done the best for him?

But Dot was not watching him. She had not even seen him yet, and she did
not know he was there till he made a great crash among the bushes, when
his foot slipped, and he rolled down thr