shavings. Perhaps it was this alone that led him about the angles and turns of the building; but as he went between the sparse substance of the timbers and their scant linear shadows that, in the sorcery of the moonlight, appeared hardly less real, he seemed as censorious a critic as Cap'n Lucy himself. Sometimes he would pause in his clumsy shamble, and, with the moonlight a-glitter in his small eyes, lift himself on his hind feet and gaze about the solitary building, indescribably melancholy in the loneliness and the wan, pensive sheen; grin with his white teeth, a-gleam with a sarcastic, snarling contempt; fall to all fours again; and, shrugging his heavy shoulders to his ears, scud along with the aspect of clumsy sportiveness common to his kind. It chanced that a light, portable forge had been in use that day, in the process of the work; the foreman had himself looked to the extinction of the fire, albeit the scene of the operation was upon the solid rock, and far from any possible communication with the building. The wind could never have turned over the low apparatus set in the hollow of the ledges, but the bear could, and did. Then he sat down suddenly to lick his singed paw, for the metal was still hot. The fuel had been charcoal; it still sustained heat, and even combustion. There was a steady spark in a few of the scattered cinders, quickening, reddening, as the eager night air touched them. The shavings amongst which they had fallen, further down the slope, were slightly astir for a moment; then a timorous blaze sprang up along the more tenuous, lace-like, curling edges. How the destructive element fared, whether by slow, insidious, fearful degrees, as of conscious but furtive evil intent, or as animated by a wild, tumultuous, riotous impulse, more and more rapacious with impunity, as of some turbulent, maddened thing escaping control, none but Bruin might say, for, save the impassive, neutral night, the event had no other witness. Before the flames had fairly taken hold of the studs and joists his cowardly fears had gained the ascendency over his gluttony. More than once he paused, in gnawing his trophy of a beef bone, to growl fiercely, his remonstrant, surprised eyes illuminated by this alien flicker. As the skies began to redden, and the pale moonlight to fail, and the great massive mountains to appear, dark and weird, from the deep and silent seclusions of the night, he left his booty and retreated toward the verge of the woods, pausing now and again in the dun-colored shadows, all veined with shifting pulsations of red and white, to look with eyes aglow, reflecting the fire, upon its ravages, growling fiercely at times; then, with his recurrent fears, setting out once more on a lumbering run.