big knees, whining hungrily, looking up into his face.

"I tell ye," said Jonathan, smiling at me, patting the dog as he spoke,
"this yere George hez got more sense'n most men. He knows what's become of
them trout we ketched. I guess he's gittin' over the way I treated him
to-day. Ye see, we wuz up the East Branch when he run a fox south. Thinks
I, the fox'll take a whirl back and cross the big runway; and, sure
enough, it warn't long afore I heard George a-comin' back, yippin' along
up through Hank Simons' holler. So I whistled to him and steered off up
onto the maountin' to take a look at Bog-eddy and try and git a pickerel.
When I come daown ag'in, I see George warn't whar I left him, so I
hollered and whistled ag'in. Then, thinks I, you're mad 'cause I left ye,
an' won't let on ye _kin_ hear; so I come along hum without him. When I
went back a while ago a-lookin' for him, would yer believe it, thar he wuz
a-layin' in the road, about forty rod this side of Hank Simons' sugar
maples, flat onto his stummick an' disgusted an' put out awful. It wuz
about all I could do ter git him hum. I knowed the minute I come in fust
time an' see he warn't here thet his feelin's wuz hurt 'cause I left him.
I presaume mebbe I oughter hollered ag'in afore I got so fer off. Then I
thought, of course, he knowed I'd gone to Bog-eddy. Beats all, what sense
some dogs hez."

I never knew Jonathan to lose patience with George but once: that was when
the dog tried to burrow into the hole of a pair of chipmunks whom Jonathan
loved. They lived in a tree blanketed with moss and lying across the wood
road. George had tried to scrape an acquaintance by crawling in
uninvited, nearly scaring the little fellows to death, and Jonathan had
flattened him into the dry leaves with his big, paddle-like hands. That
was before the bear-trap had nipped his tail, but George never forgot it.

He was particularly polite to chipmunks after that. He would lie still by
the hour and hear Jonathan talk to them without even a whine of
discontent. I watched the old man one morning up beneath the ledges,
groping, on his hands and knees, filling his pockets with nuts, and when
he reached the wood road, emptying them in a pile near the chipmunk's
tree, George looking on good-naturedly.

"Guess you leetle cunnin's better hurry up," he said, while he poured out
the nuts on the ground, his knees sticking up as he sat, like some huge
grasshopper's. "Guess ye ain't got more '