rew bigger and fatter as time went on, and some weeks
before he died he must have weighed thirty or forty pounds.

Once in a while there was a little dash of excitement to keep life from
becoming too monotonous--if too much monotony is possible in a
porcupine's existence. One night he scrambled up the steps of a little
summer cottage close to the edge of the river, and, finding the door
unlatched, he pushed it open and walked in. It proved to be a cottage
full of girls, and they stood around on chairs and the tops of
wash-stands, bombarded him with curling-irons, poked feebly with
bed-slats, and shrieked with laughter till the farmers over on the
Canadian shore turned in their beds and wondered what could be happening
on Uncle Sam's side of the river. The worst of it was that in his
travels around the room he had come up behind the door and pushed it
shut, and it was some time before even the red-haired girl could muster
up sufficient courage to climb down from her perch and open it again.

At another time an Indian robbed him of the longest and best of his
quills--nearly five inches in length some of them--and carried them off
to be used in ornamenting birch-bark baskets. And on still another
occasion he narrowly escaped death at the hands of an irate canoe-man,
in the side of whose Rob Roy he had gnawed a great hole.

The end came at last, and it was the saddest, hardest, strangest fate
that can ever come to a wild creature of the woods. He--who had never
known hunger in all his life, who was almost the only animal in the
forest who had never looked famine in the eye, whose table was spread
with good things from January to December, and whose storehouse was full
from Lake Huron to the Pictured Rocks--he of all others, was condemned
to die of starvation in the midst of plenty. The Ancient Mariner, with
water all around him and not a drop to drink, was no worse off than our
Porcupine; and the Mariner finally escaped, but the Porky didn't.

One of the summer tourists who wandered up into the north woods that
year had carried with him a little rifle, more of a toy than a weapon,
a thing that a sportsman would hardly have condescended to laugh at. And
one afternoon, by ill luck, he caught sight of the Porcupine high up in
the top of a tall tree. It was his first chance at a genuine wild beast,
and he fired away all his cartridges as fast as he could load them into
his gun. He thought that every shot missed, and he was ve