ings. Occasionally one finds
animals of various kinds in which the instinct of fear is lacking--a
frog, a young partridge, a moose calf--and wonders what golden age that
knew no fear, or what glorious vision of Isaiah in which lion and lamb
lie down together, is here set forth. I have even seen a young black
duck, whose natural disposition is wild as the wilderness itself, that
had profited nothing by his mother's alarms and her constant lessons in
hiding, but came bobbing up to my canoe among the sedges of a wilderness
lake, while his brethren crouched invisible in their coverts of bending
rushes, and his mother flapped wildly off, splashing and quacking and
trailing a wing to draw me away from the little ones.

Such an one is generally abandoned by its mother, or else is the
first to fall in the battle with the strong before she gives him up as
hopeless. Little Tookhees evidently belonged to this class, so before
leaving I undertook the task of teaching him fear, which had evidently
been too much for Nature and his own mother. I pinched him a few times,
hooting like an owl as I did so,--a startling process, which sent the
other mice diving like brown streaks to cover. Then I waved a branch
over him, like a hawk's wing, at the same time flipping him end over
end, shaking him up terribly. Then again, when he appeared with a new
light dawning in his eyes, the light of fear, I would set a stick to
wiggling like a creeping fox among the ferns and switch him sharply with
a hemlock tip. It was a hard lesson, but he learned it after a few days.
And before I finished the teaching, not a mouse would come to my table,
no matter how persuasively I squeaked. They would dart about in the
twilight as of yore, but the first whish of my stick sent them all back
to cover on the instant.

That was their stern yet, practical preparation for the robber horde
that would soon be prowling over my camping ground. Then a stealthy
movement among the ferns or the sweep of a shadow among the twilight
shadows would mean a very different thing from wriggling stick and
waving hemlock tip. Snap and swoop, and teeth and claws,--jump for your
life and find out afterwards. That is the rule for a wise wood mouse.
So I said good-by, and left them to take care of themselves in the
wilderness.

A WILDERNESS BYWAY

One day in the wilderness, as my canoe was sweeping down a beautiful
stretch of river, I noticed a little path leading through the wate