was familiar with
several), in which lived a white-and-black animal that must always be
nameless in a book, but an animal quite capable of the most pungent
defense of himself. This young aspirant to Congress would cut a long
stick, with a little crotch in the end of it, and run it into the hole;
and when the crotch was punched into the fur and skin of the animal,
he would twist the stick round till it got a good grip on the skin, and
then he would pull the beast out; and when he got the white-and-black
just out of the hole so that his dog could seize him, the boy would take
to his heels, and leave the two to fight it out, content to scent the
battle afar off. And this boy, who was in training for public life,
would do this sort of thing all the afternoon, and when the sun told him
that he had spent long enough time cutting brush, he would industriously
go home as innocent as anybody. There are few such boys as this
nowadays; and that is the reason why the New England pastures are so
much overgrown with brush.

John himself preferred to hunt the pugnacious woodchuck. He bore a
special grudge against this clover-eater, beyond the usual hostility
that boys feel for any wild animal. One day on his way to school
a woodchuck crossed the road before him, and John gave chase. The
woodchuck scrambled into an orchard and climbed a small apple-tree. John
thought this a most cowardly and unfair retreat, and stood under the
tree and taunted the animal and stoned it. Thereupon the woodchuck
dropped down on John and seized him by the leg of his trousers. John was
both enraged and scared by this dastardly attack; the teeth of the enemy
went through the cloth and met; and there he hung. John then made a
pivot of one leg and whirled himself around, swinging the woodchuck
in the air, until he shook him off; but in his departure the woodchuck
carried away a large piece of John's summer trousers-leg. The boy never
forgot it. And whenever he had a holiday, he used to expend an amount
of labor and ingenuity in the pursuit of woodchucks that would have made
his for tune in any useful pursuit. There was a hill pasture, down
on one side of which ran a small brook, and this pasture was full of
woodchuck-holes. It required the assistance of several boys to capture a
woodchuck. It was first necessary by patient watching to ascertain that
the woodchuck was at home. When one was seen to enter his burrow, then
all the entries to it except one--there