_Two Adventurers--Gray Fox and Screech Owl_ Frontispiece _Br'er Fox and Br'er Possum_ 4 _The Singer of the Night--The Screech Owl_ 16 _A Crow Chorus_ 25 _Just Out of the Nest--Young Red Squirrels_ 28 _The Dear Deer Mice_ 35 _Death-in-the-Dark--The Great Horned Owl_ 44 _Flyer, the Squirrel_ 52 _The Long-tailed Weasel_ 64 "_The Young Ravens shall neither lack nor suffer Hunger_" 82 _The Jewel-Box of the Wood Pewee_ 96 _The Red-Shouldered Hawk_ 104 _Mrs. Killdeer at Her Nest_ 108 _Mr. Flicker at Home_ 126 _The Mourning Dove in Her Nest_ 128 _Pink and White Lady Slippers_ 146 _The King of the Forest--The Banded Rattlesnake_ 154 _The Great Blue Heron at Breakfast_ 160 _The Marsh Hawk's Nest_ 164 _Lotor, the Coon_ 184 _The Seventh Sleeper--The Skunk_ 192 _The Whistlepig_ 196 _The Junco on His Watch Tower_ 219 _No Admittance--per order, Mr. Screech Owl_ 222 EVERYDAY ADVENTURES _For the sick and the sorry and the weary at heart stands a refuge at their very doors. There needs but sight to the unseeing eyes and the unstopping of deafened ears, and the way to the World where the sweet Wild-Folk dwell lies open. Therein is happiness that time cannot tarnish, the stilling of sorrow and rest from toil. Let him who hears the call heed it as he values his soul's welfare._ EVERYDAY ADVENTURES I EVERYDAY ADVENTURES All that May day long I had been trying to break my record of birds seen and heard between dawn and dark. Toward the end of the gray afternoon an accommodating Canadian warbler, wearing a black necklace across his yellow breast, carried me past my last year's mark, and I started for home in great contentment. My path wound in and out among the bare white boles of a beech wood all feathery with new green-sanguine-colored leaves. Always as I enter that wood I have a sense of a sudden silence, and I walk softly, that I may catch perhaps a last word or so of what They are saying.