This clean waterside must have many four-footed visitors, particularly in the twilight and after dark. Deer and bears are common inhabitants of the mountain woods; but for my eyes there is nothing but squirrels, with once in a long while a piece of wilder game. Twice only, in Franconia, have I come within sight of a fox. Once I was alone, in the wood-road to Sinclair’s Mills. I rounded a curve, and there the fellow stood in the middle of the way, smelling at something in the rut. After a bit (my glass had covered him instantly) he raised his head and looked down the road in a direction opposite to mine. Then he turned, saw me, started slightly, stood quite still for a fraction of a minute (I wondered why), and vanished in the woods, his white brush waving me farewell. He was gone so instantaneously that it was hard to believe he had really been there. That was a pretty good look (at a fox), but far less satisfying than the other of my Franconia experiences. With two friends I had come down through the forest from the Notch railroad by a rather blind loggers’ trail, heading for a pair of abandoned farms, grassy fields in which it is needful to give heed to one’s steps for fear of bear-traps. As we emerged into the first clearing a fox was not more than five or six rods before us, feeding in the grass. Her eyes were on her work, the wind was in our favor, and notwithstanding two of us were almost wholly exposed, we stood there on the edge of the forest for the better part of half an hour, glasses up, passing comments upon her behavior. Evidently she was lunching upon insects,--grasshoppers or crickets, I suppose,--and so taken up was she with this agreeable employment that she walked directly toward us and passed within ten yards of our position, stopping every few steps for a fresh capture. The sunlight, which shone squarely in her face, seemed to affect her unpleasantly; at all events she blinked a good deal. Her manner of stepping about, her motions in catching her prey,--driving her nose deep into the grass and pushing it home,--and in short her whole behavior, were more catlike than doglike, or so we all thought. Plainly she had no idea of abbreviating her repast, nor did she betray the slightest grain of suspiciousness or wariness, never once casting an eye about in search of possible enemies. A dog in his own dooryard could not have seemed less apprehensive of danger. As often as she approached the surrounding wood she turned and hunted back across the field. We might have played the spy upon her indefinitely; but it was always the same thing over again, and by and by, when she passed for a little out of sight behind a tuft of bushes, we followed, careless of the result, and, as it seemed, got into her wind. She started on the instant, ran gracefully up a little incline, still in the grass land, turned for the first time to look at us, and disappeared in the forest. A pretty creature she