eps from the door James Edward, the wild gander, came forward
with dignity, slightly bowing his long, graceful black neck and narrow
snaky head as he moved. Had the Boy been a stranger, he would now have
met the first touch of hostility. Not all MacPhairrson's manifest
favour would have prevented the uncompromising and dauntless
gander from greeting the visitor with a savage hiss and uplifted
wings of defiance. But towards the Boy, whom he knew well, his dark,
sagacious eye expressed only tolerance, which from him was no small
condescension.

On the doorstep, as austerely ungracious in his welcome as James
Edward himself, sat Butters, the woodchuck, nursing some secret grudge
against the world in general, or, possibly, against Ananias-and-Sapphira
in particular, with whom he was on terms of vigilant neutrality.
When the procession approached, he forsook the doorstep, turned his fat,
brown back upon the visitor, and became engrossed in gnawing a big
cabbage stalk. He was afraid that if he should seem good-natured and
friendly, he might be called upon to show off some of the tricks
which MacPhairrson, with inexhaustible patience, had taught him. He
was not going to turn somersaults, or roll over backward, or walk
like a dancing bear, for any Boy alive!

This ill humour of Butters, however, attracted no notice. It was
accepted by both MacPhairrson and his visitor as a thing of course.
Moreover, there were matters of more moment afoot. That lively,
squirming bag which the Boy carried so carefully in the hollow of his
left arm was exciting the old woodsman's curiosity. The lumbermen and
mill hands, as well as the farmer-folk of the Settlement for miles
about, were given to bringing MacPhairrson all kinds of wild creatures
as candidates for admission to his Happy Family. So whenever any one
came with something alive in a bag, MacPhairrson would regard the bag
with that hopeful and eager anticipation with which a child regards
its Christmas stocking.

When the two had entered the cabin and seated themselves, the Boy in
the big barrel chair by the window, and MacPhairrson on the edge of
his bunk, not three feet away, the rest of the company gathered in a
semicircle of expectation in the middle of the floor. That is, Stumpy
and Ebenezer and the two white cats did so, their keen noses as well
as their inquisitive eyes having been busied about the bundle. Even
James Edward came a few steps inside the door, and with a fine
assu