The children spent half the pleasant forenoon in alternate rounds of housework and out-door play, now sweeping the floor with hemlock brooms, now running out into the hazy October sunshine to play “Indians” with Nathan’s bow and arrows and Martha’s rag doll. This was stolen and carried into captivity, from which it was rescued by its heroic little mother. Then they threw off their assumed characters and ran into the house to replenish the smouldering fire, and to find that the sunshine, falling upon the floor through the window, was creeping towards the “noon mark,” making it time to begin dinner. Nathan raised the heavy trap-door to the cellar and descended the ladder, with butcher knife and pewter plate, to get the pork, but had barely got the cover off the barrel when he was recalled to the upper world by a loud cry from his sister: “Nathan, Nathan, come here quick!” He scrambled up the ladder and ran to her, where, just outside the door, she was staring intently toward the creek. “Who be them?” she asked anxiously, as she pointed at two figures just disclosed above the rushes, as they moved swiftly up the narrow channel in an unseen craft. “I guess they’re Injins,” said Nathan, after a moment’s scrutiny, “and I guess they’re a-trappin’ mushrat. Let’s run over to the bank and see.” So they ran to the crown of the low bank, where they could command a good view of the rushy level of the marsh, and the narrow belt of clear water that wound through it, reflecting the hazy blue of the sky, the tops of the scarlet water maples, the bronze and yellow weeds, and, here and there, the rough dome of a newly built muskrat house. At each of these the two men, now revealed in a birch canoe, halted for a little space, and then, tying a knot in the nearest tuft of sedge, passed on to the next. There was no mistaking the coppery hue of the faces, the straight black hair, though men of another race might wear the dirty, white blanket coats, and as skilfully manage the light craft. “Yes, they be Injins,” said Nathan, “and I wish they’d let my mushrat alone. But I s’pose there’s enough for them and me.” Presently the Indians passed quite near them, and one, speaking so softly that the children thought his voice could never have sounded the terrible war-whoop, accosted them: “How do? You Beenum boy?” “Yes,” Nathan answered; and then, obeying the Yankee instinct of inquiry, asked: “Be you gettin’ many mushrat?” “No ketch um plenty,” the Indian replied. “Ol’ Capenteese ketch um mos’ all moosquas,” and Nathan understood that he attributed the scarcity of muskrats to Job, whose fame as a hunter and trapper was known to every Waubanakee who visited this part of the lake. “Me come back pooty soon,” the Indian said, pointing up the creek with his paddle. “Den go house, see um Beenum. Buy um some pig eese.¹ S’pose he sell um lee’l bit?” ¹ Pork