The house has been given up to our occupation—the family retiring to a smaller one across the yard—and the lights are scarcely out and things grown quiet before a strange noise (apparently caused by the shuffling of many feet) is heard on the piazza upon which our door opens. “What is that?” asks Mrs. Cardigan. “Ghosts, perhaps—or bandits,” answers Sylvia. “Bears,” I suggest. “This is a bear-country.” “But I never heard that bears invaded houses—in platoons, too,” says Mrs. Cardigan. “Listen! The noise is immediately by our door. Upon my word, I don’t like this! If the door was locked it would be a different matter; but to have nothing but a chair between us and—and we don’t know what!” “It is certainly dreadful,” says Sylvia, with a laugh in her voice. “It _is_ queer. Somebody, or several somebodies, seem to be pulling something down. I tell you what”—a light spring to the floor—“I can see through the window what is going on. It is moonlight, you know.” Her bare feet trip noiselessly across the room, she pulls the curtain back from the window, looks cautiously out, and then bursts into a laugh. “Hounds,” she says. “There are several of them, and they are doing their best to get into our provisions.” “Hounds!” repeats Mrs. Cardigan, and she, too, springs to the floor. “Drive them away, for mercy’s sake! If they devour our provisions, we shall have to go back to Asheville.” The window is raised forthwith, and two voices in energetic chorus bid the hounds depart—which they do immediately. Then, having routed the enemy, they are about to return to bed, when I suggest that it will be inconvenient to repeat this performance all night. “You have repelled one attack,” I say; “but those dogs will make another in ten minutes. Don’t you think it might be well to bring the provisions in?” “Impossible,” says Mrs. Cardigan. “It would be an hour’s work. Mr. Markham has provisions for a regiment there.” “We had better bring them in,” says Sylvia. “As Alice says, it will never answer to leave them there, unless we appoint a watchman.” “It was shamefully careless of the boys to leave them,” I say—from the force of old habit we still speak of Eric and Charley as “the boys.” “_They_ ought to be waked, to take them in.” “But who is to wake them?” asks Mrs. Cardigan. “They sleep like the seven sleepers,” says Sylvia. “We might thump on their door for an hour without rousing them. Come, let us do it ourselves.” So we do it ourselves. Perhaps the hounds, if they have any sense of humor and are not too hungry, enjoy the scene from a distance—three spectral, white-robed figures engaged in conveying into safe quarters various baskets and packages of edibles. “There,” says Sylvia, when we bring the last within the door, which is fastened again with a chair, “now we will let those careful gentlemen wonder where their provisions are to-morrow morning.”