assable for men, and which even
the land-lookers avoid whenever they can, but which a cat will thread as
readily as the locomotive follows the rails. These were the localities
which the Kitten was most fond of frequenting, and here his youth
slipped rapidly away. He was fast becoming an adult lynx.

The summer passed, and half the autumn; the first snow came and went,
and again the Kitten put on his winter coat of gray, with the white
underneath, and the dark trimmings up and down his legs and along his
back. What with his mustachios, and his whiskers, and the tassels on his
ears, he was a very presentable young lynx. It would be many years
before he could hope to be as large and powerful as his father, but,
nevertheless, he was making remarkably good progress. And the time was
at hand when he would need both his good looks and his muscle.

Since his mother had left him he had seen only two or three lynxes, and
those were all much older and larger than he, and not well suited to be
his companions. But history repeats itself. One Indian-summer afternoon
he was tramping along the northern bank of the Glimmerglass, just as his
father had done two years before, and as he rounded a bend in the path
he came face to face with someone who was enough like him to have been
his twin sister. And they did as his parents had done, stood still for a
minute or two and looked at each other as if they had just found out
what they were made for. After all, life is something more than hustling
for a living, even in the woods.

But just then something else happened, and another ruling passion came
into play--the old instinct of the chase, which neither of them could
very long forget. A faint "Quack, quack, quack," came up from the lake,
and they crept to the edge of the bank, side by side, and looked down.
Above them the trees stood dreamily motionless in the mellow sunshine.
Below was a steep slope of ten or fifteen feet; beyond it a tiny strip
of sandy beach, and then the quiet water. A squadron of ducks, on their
way from the Arctic Circle to the Gulf, had taken stop-over checks for
the Glimmerglass; and now they came loitering along through the dead
bulrushes, murmuring gently, in soft, mild voices, of delicious minnows
and snails, and pausing a moment now and then to put their heads under
and dabble in the mud for some particularly choice morsel. The lynxes
crouched and waited, while their stubby tails twitched nervously, their
long,