I stood in this path one night when a fox that the dogs were driving came up behind me, stopped, and sniffed at my boots. This last November, 1907, a young fox, leaving the hounds in the tangle of his trails, trotted up this same path, turned in the pasture, and came up to the house. He halted on the edge of the lawn just above the woodchuck hole that I mentioned a few pages back, and for full ten minutes sat there in the moonlight yapping back at the shepherd dog barking at him from my neighbor’s yard below. This run up the ridge to the pasture is the highway from west to east. When the pack is baying off to the eastward, and coming nearer, I can stand by the fence between the yard and my neighbor’s pasture with the certainty of seeing the fox once in half a dozen times, and the dogs almost every time, for the fox breaks from the sprout land back of the henyard, crosses the neighboring pasture, jumps the wall, and runs my driveway to the public road and on to the woods beyond the river. All of this sounds very wild, indeed, and so it is—at night; in the daylight it is all tame enough. Only the patient watcher knows what wild feet run these open roads; only he who knows the lay of every foot of this rocky, pastured land knows that these winding cow paths lead past the barnyards on into the ledges and into dens. And no one can find all of this out in a single June. Many of our happiest glimpses of nature are accidental. We stumble upon things, yet it happens usually when we are trying to find something. The finding of a hummingbird’s nest is always an accident; and such accidents are extremely rare, as will be seen from a statement by Mr. Burroughs in which he says he has come upon but three hummingbirds’ nests in all his life! He has doubtless found many more than three owls’ nests, but perhaps not one of such finds was an accident. He _hunted_ for the owls. Night after night, in the sweet silence through which our little river sings, we hear the whimpering of the small screech owls. They are beating for mice and frogs over the meadow. So much we get without watching; but the sight of them and their nest, that came only with my visiting every tree in the neighborhood having a cavity big enough to hold the birds. At twilight, in the late spring and early summer, we frequently hear a gentle, tremulous call from the woods, or from below in the orchard. “What is it?” I had been asked a hundred times, and as many times had answered that it sounded like the hen partridge clucking to her brood; or that it made me think of the mate-call of a coon; or that I half inclined to believe it the cry of the woodchucks; or that possibly it might be made by the owls. In fact, I didn’t know the peculiar call, and year after year I kept waiting for an accident to reveal its maker and its meaning to me. There were accidents and discoveries of many sorts during these years, but not this particular accident. The accident you wait for is slow in coming.