d and jam in one pocket, and a big apple in
the other. As he sat there, slowly munching, he began to feel drowsy. He
had awakened early that morning, and had worked hard in the hot sun. He
stretched himself out full length on the log, to rest his back while he
finished eating his apple.

The branches overhead swayed gently back and forth. His eyes followed
them as they kept up that slow, monotonous motion against the bright
sky. He had no intention of closing them; in fact, he did not know they
were closed, for in that same moment he was sound asleep.

The woodpecker went on tapping; the squirrel whisked back and forth
along the limb; the same gray rabbit came out and hopped along beside
the log where he lay. Suddenly, it raised itself up to look at the
strange sight, and then bounded away again. The sun dropped lower and
lower. In the open fields there was still light, but the thicket was
gray with the subdued shadows of the gloaming.

John Jay might have slept on all night had not a leaf fluttered slowly
down from the tree above, and brushed across his face. He opened his
eyes, looking all around him in a bewildered way. Then he sat up, and
peered through the bushes. A cold perspiration covered him when he
realized that it was dusk and that he was in the middle of the gander
thicket. He snatched up the blackberries, a pail in each hand, and stood
looking helplessly around him, for he could not decide which way to go.
In front of him stretched half a mile of the haunted thicket. It was
either to push his way through that as quickly as possible, or to go
back by the long, lonesome road over which he had come.

Just then a harmless flock of geese belonging to an old market-gardener
who lived near came waddling up from the creek, on the way home to their
barn-yard. They moved along in a silent procession, pushing their long,
thin necks through the underbrush. John Jay was too terrified to see
that their heads were properly in place, and that they were as harmless
as the flock that fed in Aunt Susan's dooryard.

"They'll get me! They'll get me!" he whimpered, as they came nearer and
nearer, for his feet seemed so heavy that he could not lift them when he
tried to run. Made desperate by his fear, he raised first one pail of
berries and then the other, hurling them at the startled geese with all
the force his wiry little arms could muster.

Instantly their long white wings shot up through the bushes. There was
an angry