bore his half-shell on his back for hours after he came out; he ran less
and cheeped more than his brothers, and when one evening at the onset
of a skunk the mother gave the word 'Kwit, kwit' (Fly, fly), Runtie was
left behind, and when she gathered her brood on the piney hill he was
missing, and they saw him no more.

Meanwhile, their training had gone on. They knew that the finest
grasshoppers abounded in the long grass by the brook; they knew that the
currant-bushes dropped fatness in the form of smooth, green worms; they
knew that the dome of an ant-hill rising against the distant woods stood
for a garner of plenty; they knew that strawberries, though not really
insects, were almost as delicious; they knew that the huge danaid
butterflies were good, safe game, if they could only catch them, and
that a slab of bark dropping from the side of a rotten log was sure to
abound in good things of many different kinds; and they had learned,
also, that yellow-jackets, mud-wasps, woolly worms, and hundred-leggers
were better let alone.

It was now July, the Moon of Berries. The chicks had grown and
flourished amazingly during this last month, and were now so large that
in her efforts to cover them the mother was kept standing all night.

They took their daily dust-bath, but of late had changed to another
higher on the hill. It was one in use by many different birds, and at
first the mother disliked the Idea of such a second-hand bath. But the
dust was of such a fine, agreeable quality, and the children led the way
with such enthusiasm, that she forgot her mistrust.

After a fortnight the little ones began to droop and she herself did not
feel very well. They were always hungry, and though they ate enormously,
they one and all grew thinner and thinner. The mother was the last to be
affected. But when it came, it came as hard on her--a ravenous hunger, a
feverish headache, and a wasting weakness. She never knew the cause. She
could not know that the dust of the much-used dust-bath, that her true
instinct taught her to mistrust at first, and now again to shun, was
sown with parasitic worms, and that all of the family were infested.

No natural impulse is without a purpose. The mother-birds knowledge of
healing was only to follow natural impulse. The eager, feverish craving
for something, she knew not what, led her to eat, or try, everything
that looked eatable and to seek the coolest woods. And there she found a
deadly suma