finitesimal
pipings and covering my flesh with infinitesimal bitings. I thought I
should have to flee to the friendly fumes of the old stable, with "one
stocking off and one stocking on;" but I got my shoe on at last, though
not without many amusing interruptions and digressions.

In a few moments after this adventure I was in rapid retreat toward
camp. Just as I reached the path leading from the shanty to the creek,
my companion in the same ignoble flight reached it also, his hat broken
and rumpled, and his sanguine countenance looking more sanguinary than
I had ever before seen it, and his speech, also, in the highest degree
inflammatory. His face and forehead were as blotched and swollen as if
he had just run his head into a hornets' nest, and his manner as
precipitate as if the whole swarm was still at his back.

No smoke or smudge which we ourselves could endure was sufficient in
the earlier part of that evening to prevent serious annoyance from the
same cause; but later a respite was granted us.

About ten o'clock, as we stood round our camp-fire, we were startled by
a brief but striking display of the aurora borealis. My imagination had
already been excited by talk of legends and of weird shapes and
appearances, and when, on looking up toward the sky, I saw those pale,
phantasmal waves of magnetic light chasing each other across the little
opening above our heads, and at first sight seeming barely to clear the
treetops, I was as vividly impressed as if I had caught a glimpse of a
veritable spectre of the Neversink. The sky shook and trembled like a
great white curtain.

After we had climbed to our loft and had lain down to sleep, another
adventure befell us. This time a new and uninviting customer appeared
upon the scene, the _genius loci_ of the old stable, namely, the
"fretful porcupine." We had seen the marks and work of these animals
about the shanty, and had been careful each night to hang our traps,
guns, etc., beyond their reach, but of the prickly night-walker himself
we feared we should not get a view.

We had lain down some half hour, and I was just on the threshold of
sleep, ready, as it were, to pass through the open door into the land
of dreams, when I heard outside somewhere that curious sound,--a sound
which I had heard every night I spent in these woods, not only on this
but on former expeditions, and which I had settled in my mind as
proceeding from the porcupine, since I knew the sounds our