This is not a tale of far away and long ago--in the Black Forest, for instance--but a true story of the summer just past, and it comes from under the shadow of our own White Mountains, where two boys made discoveries in the great out of doors. The boys let me into many of their secrets, and now the summer is gone I am allowed to tell this one, because, if you have never happened to find a big table spread not under the trees for picnic people, but high up in a tree for woods people, you will want to look for one next summer. This was, of course, a wooden table, its cover both snowy and glossy; the plates, which were round, and all the same size, were of wood and placed in straight, regular rows, six hundred and fifty of them--that is true, for the boys counted and computed--a hospitable board, you think, and you will be sure of it when you know the whole story! The butler--who was also host--not only arranged but carved the plates, and wore a business suit of black and white, with a bright red cap and necktie of the same cheerful hue over a buff shirt. The feast at this table was continuous, consisting of choice game, and the sweetest of sweets. The guests, who came and went during all the sunshine hours, were so various in dress and manners that they could not be compared with those at any public or private banquet ever known, so the puzzle must stop here and the plain facts be told. The table was twenty feet from the ground, and set on one side of a tree, so, though of wood, and as round as the tree, you see it differed from your dining-table--and King Arthur's--in being tipped perpendicularly so as to arrange the plates in straight rows, close together, thus accommodating more guests. The table cover was of the best quality of birch bark. The butler host--or perhaps we might call him the architect of the feast--was the Yellow-breasted Sapsucker; if you didn't know him well you would call him just one of the woodpeckers; he had all their peculiarities, crawled around up and down the tree trunk, bracing himself with his tail, pecking, pounding and boring, he excavated the hundreds of round holes, each one a soup plate to catch and hold the ascending sap. This is what the Sapsucker seeks, and upon this alone he can live all summer, as proved by Mr. Frank Bolles, who tells us how he caught and kept young Sapsuckers alive till October, feeding them only on diluted maple syrup. But tiny insects are fond of sweets, too; they swarmed around and lost themselves in our woodpecker's full soup plates, thus furnishing him with the animal food needed by such a worker.