does in deep meditation. If he had hands they would have been clasped behind his back when in this attitude, as his wings were. Again he lifted his head high, fluffed out those glossy black neck feathers and strutted. Here surely was a fine phrase that would reach the waiting heart of that mottled brown hen that was now quietly keeping by herself in some secluded corner of the wood. The thought threw out his chest, and those tail feathers that had folded slimly as he walked in pensive meditation spread and cocked fan-shaped. I half expected him to open his strong, pointed bill and gobble as a turkey does under similar circumstances. The demure placing of star after star in that necklace trail was broken by a little fantastic _pas seul_, from which he dropped suddenly on both feet, vaulted into the air, and whirred away down arcades of snowy whiteness and vanished. I don’t think he saw me. He was rushing to find the lady and recite that poem to her before he forgot it. On the white page of the path that lay open under groined arches of alabaster no foot had written a record for many rods, then it seemed as if from side to side stretched a highway. Back and forth in straight lines had gone a creature that made a lovely decorative pattern of a trail, a straight line firmly drawn as if with a stylus, on either side at a distance say of three-fourths of an inch tiny footmarks just opposite each other, while alternating with these and nearer the middle line were fainter and finer footprints. Here the tiny deer-mouse had drawn his long tail through the snow, whisking from stump to stump in a quiver of excitement lest an enemy gobble him up, shooting across like a gray shuttle weaving this exquisite pattern that is like that of a dainty embroidery on a lady’s collar. How he can gallop so regularly and make his tail mark so straight is more than I can tell. Indeed, so sly he is and so swiftly does he go that I have never seen him make it. Beside this tiny pattern the marks where the gray squirrel has leaped across are like those of an hippopotamus on a rampage and the print of my own snowshoe was as if there had been a catastrophe and a section of the sky had fallen. Along with the tiny mouse tracks were those of our least squirrel, the chipmunk. There is no difficulty about seeing him. He will almost come if you whistle for him. If you will camp near his burrow you may teach him to come and eat nuts out of your hand, answering any prearranged signal, such as whacking them together or chirping to him.