"Shoot!" shouted her brother. "Oh, dear, oh, dear," she said helplessly, "he's gone out of sight! And I had such a splendid shot!" She stamped with vexation. "What a goose!" she repeated. "I had a perfectly splendid shot. And all I did was to jump like a scared cat and stare!" "Anyway, you didn't run, and that's a point gained," observed her brother. "I had to. And that's one on me." A moment later he said: "I believe those impudent boar do need a little thinning out. When is Duane coming?" "In November," said Geraldine, still looking vaguely about for the departed pig. "Early?" "I think so, if his father is all right again. I've asked Naida, too. Rosalie wants to come----" "Oh, for Heaven's sake, don't," he protested. "All I wanted was a shooting party to do a little scientific thinning out of these boar. I'll do some myself, too." Geraldine laughed. "Rosalie is a dead shot at a target, dear. She wrote asking us to invite her to shoot. I don't see how I can very well refuse her. Do you?" "That means her husband, too," grumbled Scott, "and that entire bunch." "No; if it's a shooting party, I don't have to ask him." Her brother said ungraciously: "Well, I don't care who you ask if they'll thin out these cheeky brutes. Fancy that two-year-old pig clattering his tusks at me, planted there in the path with his mane on end!--You know it mortifies me, Kathleen--it certainly does. One of these fine days some facetious pig will send me shinning up a tree!" He grew madder at the speculative indignity. "By ginger! I'm going to have a shooting party before the snow flies," he muttered, walking forward between Kathleen and his sister. "Keep your eyes out ahead; we may jump another at any time, as the wind is all right. And if we do, let him have it, Geraldine!" It was a beautiful woodland through which they moved. The late autumn foliage was unusually magnificent, lacking, this year, those garish and discordant hues which Americans think it necessary to admire. Oak brown and elm yellow, deep chrome bronze and sombre crimson the hard woods glowed against backgrounds of pine and hemlock. Larches were mossy cones of feathery gold; birches slim shafts of snowy gray, ochre-crowned; silver and green the balsams' spires pierced the canopy of splendid tapestry upborne by ash and oak and towering pine under a sky of blue so deep and intense that the lakes reflecting it seemed no less vivid. Already in the brooks they passed painted trout hung low over every bed of gravel and white sand; the male trout wore his best scarlet fins, and his sides glowed in alternate patterns, jewelled with ruby and sapphire spots. Already the ruffed grouse thundered up by coveys, though they had not yet packed, for the broods still retained their autonomy.