Strong strode off in the trail to Catamount Pond, where he was to get Master. Zeb, the bear-dog, had been digging at a foxhole over in Birch Hollow. Growing weary and athirst, by-and-by he relinquished his enterprise, crossed to the trail, and, discovering the scent of strangers, hurried home. Soon he found those curious little folks down in the potato-hole. He had never seen a child before. He smelled them over cautiously. His opinion was extremely favorable. His tail began to wag, and, unable to restrain his enthusiasm, he expressed himself in a loud bark. The children awoke, and Zeb retreated. Socky and Sue rose, the latter crying, while that little, yellow snip of a bear-dog, with cross-eye and curving tail, surveyed them anxiously. He backed away as if to coax them out of the hole. When they had come near he seemed to be wiping one foot after another upon the ground vigorously. As he did so he growled in a manner calculated to inspire respect. Then he ran around them in a wide circle at high speed, growling a playful challenge. Socky, who had some understanding of dogs, dashed upon Zeb, and soon they were all at play together. IX. ON Catamount Pond young Master had enjoyed a memorable day. He was an expert fisherman, but the lonely quiet of the scene had been more than fish to him: of it was a barren ridge, from the top of which a broken column of dead pine, like a shaft of wrought marble, towered straight and high above the woods. The curving shore had a fringe of lily-pads, starred here and there with white tufts. Around thickets of birch, on a point of land, a little cove was the end of all the deer-trails that came out of Jiminy Swamp. It was the gateway of the pond for all who journeyed thither to eat and drink. There were white columns on either side, and opposite the cove's end was a thicket of tamarack, clear of brush. A deep mat of vivid green moss came to the water's edge. When one had rounded the point in his canoe, he could see into those cool, dark alleys of the deer, leading off through slender tamaracks. A little beyond were the rock bastions of Painter Mountain, five hundred' feet above the water. The young man, having grown weary of fishing, leaned back, lighted his pipe, and drifted. He could hear the chattering of a hedgehog up in the dry timber, and the scream of a hawk, like the whistle of some craft, leagues away on the sunlit deep of silence. A wild goose steered straight across the heavens, far bound, his wings making a noise like the cleaving of water and the creak of full sails. He saw the man below him and flung a cry overboard. A great bee, driven out of a lily, threw his warning loop around the head of the intruder and boomed out of hearing. Those threads of sound seemed to bind the tongue of the youth, and to connect his soul with the great silence into which they ran.