I was on the jump; I was already rounding the barn, when a series of terrified shrieks issued from the front of the house. An instant more and I had come. But none too soon, for there stood the dear girl, backed into a corner of the porch, her dainty robes drawn close about her, and a skunk, a wee baby of a skunk, climbing confidently up the steps toward her. “Why _are_ you so slow!” she gasped. “I’ve been yelling here for an hour!--Oh! do--don’t kill that little thing, but shoo it away, quick!” She certainly had not been yelling an hour, nor anything like it. But there was no time for argument now, and as for shooing little skunks, I was past that. I don’t know exactly what I did say, though I am positive that it wasn’t “shoo.” I was clutching a great stone, that I had run with all the way from behind the hen-yard, and letting it fly, I knocked the little creature into a harmless bunch of fur. The family went over to the bean supper and left me all alone on the farm. But I was calm now, with a strange, cold calmness born of extremity. Nothing more could happen to me; I was beyond further harm. So I took up the bodies of the two creatures, and carried them, together with some of my late clothing, over beyond the ridge for burial. Then I returned by way of my neighbor’s, where I borrowed two sticks of blasting-powder and a big cannon fire-cracker. I had watched my neighbor use these explosives on the stumps in a new piece of meadow. The next morning, with an axe, a crowbar, shovel, gun, blasting-powder, and the cannon-cracker, I started for the stump in the wood-lot. I wished the cannon-cracker had been a keg of powder. I could tamp a keg of powder so snugly into the hole of those skunks! It was a beautiful summer morning, tender with the half-light of breaking dawn, and fresh with dew. Leaving my kit at the mouth of the skunks’ den, I sat down on the stump to wait a moment, for the loveliness and wonder of the opening day came swift upon me. From the top of a sapling, close by, a chewink sent his simple, earnest song ringing down the wooded slope, and, soft as an echo, floated up from the swampy tangle of wild grape and azalea the pure notes of a wood thrush, mellow and globed, and almost fragrant of the thicket where the white honeysuckle was in bloom. Voices never heard at other hours of the day were vocal now; odors and essences that vanish with the dew hung faint in the air; shapes and shadows and intimations of things that slip to cover from the common light, stirred close about me. It was very near--the gleam! the vision splendid! How close to a revelation seems every dawn! And this early summer dawn, how near a return of that time when meadow, grove, and stream, The earth and every common sight To me did seem Apparelled in celestial light.