, for he
quickly made his way to the beach and disappeared in the woods, still
chattering disrespectfully. My friend waded ashore, righted his canoe,
and we resumed our journey. I don't think I'll tell you what he said. He
got over it after a while, and in the end he probably enjoyed his joke
more than if it had turned out as he had intended.

The summer followed the winter into the past, and the Moon of Falling
Leaves came round again. The Porcupine was not alone. Another porky was
with him, and the two seemed very good friends. In fact, his companion
was the very same lady porcupine who had stood by while he fought the
battle of the log and the lily-pads, though I do not suppose that they
had been keeping company all those months, and I am by no means certain
that they remembered that eventful morning at all. Let us hope they
did, for the sake of the story. Who knows how much or how little of love
was stirring the slow currents of their sluggish natures--of such love
as binds the dove or the eagle to his mate, or of such steadfast
affection as the Beaver and his wife seem to have felt for each other?
Not much, perhaps; yet they climbed the same tree, ate from the same
branch, and drank at the same spring; and the next April there was
another arrival in the old hollow log--twins, this time, and both of
them alive.

But the Porcupine never saw his children, for a wandering fit seized
him, and he left the Glimmerglass before they were born. Two or three
miles away was a little clearing where a mossback lived. A railway
crossed one edge of it, between the hill and the swamp, and five miles
away was a junction, where locomotives were constantly moving about,
backing, hauling, and making up their trains. As the mossback lay awake
in the long, quiet, windless winter nights, he often heard them puffing
and snorting, now with slow, heavy coughs, and now quick and sharp and
rapid. One night when he was half asleep he heard something that said,
"chew-chew-chew-chew-chew-chew," like an engine that has its train
moving and is just beginning to get up speed. At first he paid no
attention to it. But the noise suddenly stopped short, and after a pause
of a few seconds it began again at exactly the same speed; stopped
again, and began a third time. And so it went on, chewing and pausing,
chewing and pausing, with always just so many chews to the second, and
just so many seconds to each rest. No locomotive ever puffed like that.
The