ffle, edged with black, tied around the middle of
her body. But the boy wasn't thinking about ruffles, and he didn't care
what she did with her quills. He gave her such a thrust with his stick
that she had to grab at the log with both hands to keep from being
shoved into the water. That left her nose unprotected, and he brought
the stick down across it once, twice, three times. Then he picked her up
by one foot, very gingerly, and carried her off; and our Porky never saw
his mother again.

Perhaps we had best follow her up and see what finally became of her.
Half a mile from the scene of the murder the boy came upon a woman and a
little girl. I sha'n't try to describe them, except to say that they
were even worse off than he. Perhaps you read in the papers, some years
ago, about the woman and the two children who were lost for several
weeks in the woods of northern Michigan.

"I've got a porky," said the boy.

[Illustration: "_High up in the top of a tall hemlock._"]

He dropped his burden on the ground, and they all stood around and
looked at it. They were hungry--oh, so hungry!--but for some reason they
did not seem very eager to begin. An old porcupine with her clothes on
is not the most attractive of feasts, and they had no knife with which
to skin her, no salt to season the meat, no fire to cook it, and no
matches with which to start one. Rubbing two sticks together is a very
good way of starting a fire when you are in a book, but it doesn't work
very well in the Great Tahquamenon Swamp. And yet, somehow or other--I
don't know how, and I don't want to--they ate that porcupine. And it did
them good. When the searchers found them, a week or two later, the woman
and the boy were dead, but the little girl was still alive, and for all
I know she is living to this day.

Let us return to the Glimmerglass. The young Porcupine ought to have
mourned deeply for his mother, but I grieve to say that he did nothing
of the kind. I doubt if he was even very lonesome. His brain was
smaller, smoother, and less corrugated than yours is supposed to be; its
wrinkles were few and not very deep; and it may be that the bump of
filial affection was quite polished, or even that there wasn't any such
bump at all. Anyhow, he got along very well without her, dispensing with
her much more easily than the woman and the boy and girl could have.
He watched stolidly while the boy killed her and carried her off, and a
little later he was eating