s hind-legs, and vaguely
and deprecatingly waved a baby-paw, fringed with little hooks of steel.
I took the paw, and shook it gravely. From that moment we were friends.
The little affair of the serape was forgotten.

Nevertheless, I was wise enough to cement our friendship by an act
of delicate courtesy. Following the direction of his eyes, I had no
difficulty in finding on a shelf near the ridge-pole the sugar-box and
the square lumps of white sugar that even the poorest miner is never
without. While he was eating them, I had time to examine him more
closely. His body was a silky, dark, but exquisitely-modulated gray,
deepening to black in his paws and muzzle. His fur was excessively long,
thick, and soft as eider-down; the cushions of flesh beneath perfectly
infantine in their texture and contour. He was so very young, that the
palms of his half-human feet were still tender as a baby's. Except for
the bright blue, steely hooks, half sheathed in his little toes, there
was not a single harsh outline or detail in his plump figure. He was as
free from angles as one of Leda's offspring. Your caressing hand
sank away in his fur with dreamy languor. To look at him long was an
intoxication of the senses; to pat him was a wild delirium; to embrace
him, an utter demoralization of the intellectual faculties.

When he had finished the sugar, he rolled out of the door with a
half-diffident, half-inviting look in his eyes as if he expected me
to follow. I did so; but the sniffing and snorting of the keen-scented
Pomposo in the hollow not only revealed the cause of his former terror,
but decided me to take another direction. After a moment's hesitation,
he concluded to go with me, although I am satisfied, from a certain
impish look in his eye, that he fully understood and rather enjoyed the
fright of Pomposo. As he rolled along at my side, with a gait not unlike
a drunken sailor, I discovered that his long hair concealed a leather
collar around his neck, which bore for its legend the single word
"Baby!" I recalled the mysterious suggestion of the two miners. This,
then, was the "baby" with whom I was to "play."

How we "played;" how Baby allowed me to roll him down hill, crawling
and puffing up again each time with perfect good-humor; how he climbed
a young sapling after my Panama hat, which I had "shied" into one of the
topmost branches; how, after getting it, he refused to descend until it
suited his pleasure; how, when he did c