"Why, certainly, Caroline can show you--she knows all the trails. Yes, indeed, she'd be delighted, I'm sure.... Oh, any time you prefer. Don't let her dawdle along, though; she's such a strange child--sometimes it will take her ten minutes to get across the road, and then another time she will be as quick as a flash. I'll see where she is." But even as the boards squeaked above her head, Caroline had fled, and Henry D. Thoreau, smarting from the indignity of her brown, berry-stained hand circling his muzzle, was expressing his feelings to the yellow birches and ground pine. "Oh shut up, won't you, Henry D.?" she urged him indignantly, "do you want to take that fat old tiresome lady around our nice mountain? I don't b'lieve you do. You can be called 'girlie' if you want to--I don't. She is so hot and she creaks so when she walks! I _had_ to hold your nose." Henry D., who had only wanted an explanation, subsided, and they trudged on in silence, Indian file, along the narrow trail. The early afternoon sun filtered down through the birch and beech leaves on Caroline's brown head and Henry D.'s brindled back, pine needles crunched under their feet, thick glossy moss twinkled with last night's rain. They sniffed the damp, wholesome mold delightedly; from time to time Caroline kicked the rotten stump of some pithy, crumbling trunk or marked patterns with her finger nail in the thin new moss of some smooth slab. Indian pipes and glowing juniper berries embroidered the way; pale, late anemones, deceived by the cold mountain weather, sprang up between the giant mushrooms. It was as still as eternity. The wood grew steadily thicker, the light pierced down in golden arrows only, the silence was almost oppressive. Caroline stepped suddenly out of the tiny path, pushed aside a clump of fern, buried her arm up to the elbow in a hollow stump and produced a large crumbling molasses cooky. "Just where I left it, Henry D., just exactly!" she whispered delightedly. "I wish now I'd left 'em both, but I didn't feel able to spare 'em at the time." They ate the cooky pleasantly, Henry D. receiving every third bite with scrupulous accuracy. "I used to think maybe that huckleberry-boy followed us up and discovered our places, but this proves he don't," she announced, as the last crumb disappeared; "he's not so smart as he thinks he is, is he, Henry D.?" They trotted on, moving more quickly as the faint, regular crash of an axe on wood came nearer and nearer. A barbed-wire fence had sprung up unaccountably in the wood, following a devious course among the thick trees, and as they scrambled carefully under it, Henry D. pausing with accustomed gallantry while his mistress disentangled two petticoats and an unfortunate stocking, a little gray-shingled cottage jumped out suddenly from the gray beeches, and they emerged into its front yard.