in particular he had developed a personal interest.
Suddenly and violently he jumped to his feet, hoping to chase her away
from the approaching doom. But he was just too late. As he jumped, the
big frog sprang, and a long, darting, cleft tongue clutched the busy
fly, dragging her down. The frog disappeared with his prize,--to come
to the surface again at the edge of a lily-pad, a few feet off, and
blink his goggle-eyes in satisfaction. He had avenged (though about
that he cared as little as he knew) the lives of a thousand tadpoles.

The Alien of the Wild

A full day's tramp back from the settlement, on the edge of a
water-meadow beside the lonely Quah-Davic, stood the old woodsman's
cabin. Beside it he had built a snug log-barn, stored with hay from
the wild meadow. The hay he had made that August, being smitten with a
desire for some touch of the civilization to which as a whole he could
not reconcile himself. Then, with a still enthusiasm, he had built his
barn, chinking its crevices scrupulously with moss and mud. He had
resolved to have a cow. The dream that gave new zest to all his waking
hours was the fashioning of a little farm in this sunny, sheltered
space about his cabin. He had grown somewhat weary of living by trap
and snare and gun, hunting down the wild creatures whom he had come to
regard, through lapse of the long, solitary years by the Quah-Davic,
as in some sense comrade and kin to him.

It was late autumn, and the asters fading out like smoke along the
river edges, when the barn was finished and the hay safe stored
therein. Then the old woodsman journeyed out to the settlement to buy
his cow. He found one exactly to his whimsical liking,--a small, dark
red, long-horned scrub, with a look in her big, liquid eyes that made
him feel she would know how to take care of herself in the perilous
wilds. He equipped her with the most sonorous and far-sounding bell he
could find in all the settlement. Then proudly he led her away to her
new domain in the wilderness.

When the long-horned little cow had been salted and foddered in the
new barn, and when her liquid eyes had taken in the surroundings of
the sunny little meadow and cabin by the lonely Quah-Davic, she was
well enough content, and the mellow _tunk-a-tonk, tank tonk_ of her
bell was sounded never out of ear-shot from the cabin. The meadow and
the nearest fringes of the woods were range enough for her. Of the
perils that might lurk in the