by a
good square tramp to the railroad station, twenty-three miles distant,
as it proved. Two miles brought us to stumpy fields, and to the house
of the upper inhabitant. They told us there was a short cut across the
mountain, but my soldier shook his head.

"Better twenty miles of Europe," said he, getting Tennyson a little
mixed, "than one of Cathay, or Slide Mountain either."

Drops of the much-needed rain began to come down, and I hesitated in
front of the woodshed.

"Sprinkling weather always comes to some bad end," said Aaron, with a
reminiscence of an old couplet in his mind, and so it proved, for it
did not get beyond a sprinkle, and the sun shone out before noon.

In the next woods I picked up from the middle of the road the tail and
one hind leg of one of our native rats, the first I had ever seen
except in a museum. An owl or fox had doubtless left it the night
before. It was evident the fragments had once formed part of a very
elegant and slender creature. The fur that remained (for it was not
hair) was tipped with red. My reader doubtless knows that the common
rat is an importation, and that there is a native American rat, usually
found much farther south than the locality of which I am writing, that
lives in the woods,--a sylvan rat, very wild and nocturnal in his
habits, and seldom seen even by hunters or woodmen. Its eyes are large
and fine, and its form slender. It looks like only a far-off
undegenerate cousin of the filthy creature that has come to us from the
long-peopled Old World. Some creature ran between my feet and the fire
toward morning, the last night we slept in the woods, and I have little
doubt it was one of these wood-rats.

The people in these back settlements are almost as shy and furtive as
the animals. Even the men look a little scared when you stop them by
your questions. The children dart behind their parents when you look at
them. As we sat on a bridge resting,--for our packs still weighed
fifteen or twenty pounds each,--two women passed us with pails on their
arms, going for blackberries. They filed by with their eyes down like
two abashed nuns.

In due time we found an old road, to which we had been directed, that
led over the mountain to the West Branch. It was a hard pull, sweetened
by blackberries and a fine prospect. The snowbird was common along the
way, and a solitary wild pigeon shot through the woods in front of us,
recalling the nests we had seen on the East Branc