witness and backer; a type of the gentle and
harmless in savage nature. She has no sagacity to give me or lend me,
but that soft, nimble foot of hers, and that touch as of cotton
wherever she goes, are worthy of emulation. I think I can feel her
goodwill through the floor, and I hope she can mine. When I have a
happy thought, I imagine her ears twitch, especially when I think of
the sweet apple I will place by her doorway at night. I wonder if that
fox chanced to catch a glimpse of her the other night when he
stealthily leaped over the fence near by and walked along between the
study and the house? How clearly one could read that it was not a
little dog that had passed there! There was something furtive in the
track; it shied off away from the house and around it, as if eying it
suspiciously; and then it had the caution and deliberation of the
fox,--bold, bold, but not too bold; wariness was in every footprint.
If it had been a little dog that had chanced to wander that way, when
he crossed my path he would have followed it up to the barn and have
gone smelling around for a bone; but this sharp, cautious track held
straight across all others, keeping five or six rods from the house,
up the hill, across the highway toward a neighboring farmstead, with
its nose in the air, and its eye and ear alert, so to speak.

A winter neighbor of mine, in whom I am interested, and who perhaps
lends me his support after his kind, is a little red owl, whose
retreat is in the heart of an old apple-tree just over the fence.
Where he keeps himself in spring and summer, I do not know, but late
every fall, and at intervals all winter, his hiding-place is
discovered by the jays and nuthatches, and proclaimed from the
treetops for the space of half an hour or so, with all the powers of
voice they can command. Four times during one winter they called me
out to behold this little ogre feigning sleep in his den, sometimes in
one apple-tree, sometimes in another. Whenever I heard their cries, I
knew my neighbor was being berated. The birds would take turns at
looking in upon him, and uttering their alarm-notes. Every jay within
hearing would come to the spot, and at once approach the hole in the
trunk or limb, and with a kind of breathless eagerness and excitement
take a peep at the owl, and then join the outcry. When I approached
they would hastily take a final look, and then withdraw and regard my
movements intently. After accustoming my eye to