The work of Mr. and Mrs. Partridge was so well done that Joe found it very difficult to discover the nest when he went out of the office. He knew where it was from his window, but when he came to look for it out of doors it seemed to have disappeared, so deftly was it concealed; and he would have been compelled to hunt for it very carefully but for the fact that when Mrs. Partridge found herself disturbed she rushed from the little grass tunnel and threw herself at Joe's feet, fluttering around as if desperately wounded, and uttering strange little cries of distress. Once she actually touched his feet with her wings, but when he stooped to pick her up she managed to flutter off just out of reach of his hand. Joe followed along after Mrs. Partridge for some little distance, and he discovered that the farther she led him away from her nest the more her condition improved, until finally she ran off into the sedge and disappeared. Joe has never been able to find any one to tell him how Mrs. Partridge knew what kind of antics a badly wounded bird would cut up. He has been told that it is the result of instinct. The scientists say, however, that instinct is the outgrowth of necessity; but it seems hard to believe that necessity could have given Mrs. Partridge such accurate knowledge of the movements of a wounded bird. In carrying proofs from the printing-office to the editor, Joe Maxwell made two discoveries that he considered very important. One was that there was a big library of the best books at his command, and the other was that there was a pack of well-trained harriers on the plantation. He loved books and he loved dogs, and if he had been asked to choose between the library and the harriers he would have hesitated a long time. The books were more numerous--there were nearly two thousand of them, while there were only five harriers--but in a good many respects the dogs were the liveliest. Fortunately, Joe was not called on to make any choice. He had the dogs to himself in the late afternoon and the books at night, and he made the most of both. More than this, he had the benefit of the culture of the editor of _The Countryman_ and of the worldly experience of Mr. Snelson, the printer. To Joe Maxwell, sadly lacking in knowledge of mankind, Mr. Snelson seemed to be the most engaging of men. He was the echo and mouthpiece of a world the youngster had heard of but never seen, and it pleased him to hear the genial printer rehearse his experiences, ranging all the way from Belfast, Ireland, where he was born, to all the nooks and corners of the United States, including the little settlement where the plantation newspaper was published. Mr. Snelson had been a tramp and almost a tragedian, and he was pleased on many occasions to give his little apprentice a taste of his dramatic art. He would stuff a pillow under his coat and give readings from Richard III, or wrap his wife's mantilla about him and play Hamlet. [Illustration: 0047]