whole bouquet of evergreens,
exquisite, fairy-like forms that later shall gladden our Christmas
table.

But how they gladden and cheer the October woods! Summer dead? Hope
all gone? Life vanished away? See here, under this big pine, a whole
garden of arbutus, green and budded, almost ready to bloom! The snows
shall come before their sweet eyes open; but open they will at the very
first touch of spring. We will gather a few, and let them wake up in
saucers of clean water in our sunny south windows.

Leaves for the pig, and arbutus for us! We make a clean sweep down the
hillside "jumping" a rabbit from its form under a brush-pile,
discovering where a partridge roosts in a low-spreading hemlock; coming
upon a snail cemetery in a hollow hickory stump; turning up a
yellow-jackets' nest built two thirds underground; tracing the tunnel
of a bobtailed mouse in its purposeless windings in the leaf-mould,
digging into a woodchuck's--

"But come, boys, get after those bags! It is leaves in the hay-rig we
want, not woodchucks at the bottom of woodchuck-holes."

Two small boys catch up a bag, and hold it open, while two more stuff
in the crackling leaves. Then I come along with my big feet, and pack
the leaves in tight, and on to the rig goes the bulging bag.

Exciting? If you can't believe it exciting, hop up on the load, and
let us jog you home. Swish! bang! thump! tip! turn! joggle! jolt!
Hold on to your ribs. Pull in your popping eyes. Look out for the
stump! Isn't it fun to go leafing? Is n't it fun to do anything that
your heart does with you?--even though you do it for a pig!

Just watch the pig as we shake out the bags of leaves. See him caper,
spin on his toes, shake himself, and curl his tail. That curl is his
laugh. We double up and weep when we laugh hard; but the pig can't
weep, and he can't double himself up; so he doubles up his tail. There
is where his laugh comes off, curling and kinking in little spasms of
pure pig joy.

"Boosh! Boosh!" he snorts, and darts around the pen like a whirlwind,
scattering the leaves in forty ways, to stop short--the shortest
stop!--and fall to rooting for acorns.

He was once a long-tusked boar of the forest, this snow-white,
sawed-off, pug-nose little porker of mine--ages and ages ago. But he
still remembers the smell of the forest leaves; he still knows the
taste of the acorn-mast; he is still wild pig somewhere deep down
within him.

And we were once