A chipmunk ran down a tree trunk and scolded him viciously, and then fled before him to another tree, where it awaited him angrily, evidently under the impression that he was following it with evil designs upon its winter stores. In this way it preceded him to the edge of the corn-field, and finally vanished into a hole in a half-dead pine that stood near the clearing, putting out its head once more with a last outpouring of abuse. "Oh! little fellow," said Dick, "I am afraid your nuts will be wasted, for to-morrow we chop the tree down. But I 've promised Stephanie that first I 'll climb up and poke you out with a stick--and get bitten for my pains, I suppose, you little spitfire. So you need not be afraid you 'll be killed." He ran a hand over the smooth bark, blue-black, mottled with fragile green lichens, with no thought of its beauty. "Half rotten," he said to himself, "and it ought to go down as easily as a bulrush." And he turned away, his mind full of the fascinating way in which the bright blades of the axes would bite deep through that beautiful dark bark into the sweet-smelling white wood beneath; of how the chips would scatter and fly, and lie like creamy shreds of ivory underfoot; of the tremor that would seem to shake the neighbouring woods at the sound of the falling of the tree. CHAPTER II. The Fall of the Tree. Next morning the year had grown perceptibly older; or so it seemed to Stephanie, as she stood in the doorway of the log-cabin, looking across the misty clearing to the golden forests that encircled it. The fallen leaves looked browner, each furred at the edge with a delicate fringe of hoar-frost; and the newly risen sun strove as yet in vain to send some heat through the faint, cold haze. It was more penetratingly chill than if it had been the drier winter time. Stephanie snuggled into her little gray shawl with a keen appreciation of its rough warmth, and watched her breath floating as tiny silver clouds in the almost motionless air. She was a tall, strong girl, with an unexpectedly plaintive face--a quaint, dark-eyed face which suited well with her quaint foreign name. Already she looked older than Dick, for her eyes were grave, and her mouth had taken a firm, responsible curve; it was a look which comes sometimes to motherless girls who have men-folk to manage and care for.