ten, which the panther carried off. After the
boys had thrown out two more martens, the panther did not return, and
they saw nothing more of it. As soon as day dawned they crept forth from
their shattered camp, hastened down the stream and reached home with
their trapped animals.

The first time I heard Grandsir Billy tell the story he said that the
panther was as large as a yearling steer. Later he declared that it was
the size of a two-year-old steer; and I have frequently heard him say
that it was as large as a three-year-old! The old Squire said it was as
large as the largest dog he ever saw.

CHAPTER XXXVII

ADDISON'S POCKETFUL OF AUGER CHIPS

Another year had now passed, and we were not much nearer realizing our
plans for getting an education than when Master Pierson left us the
winter before.

Owing to the bad times and a close money market, lumbering scarcely more
than paid expenses that winter. This and the loss of five work-horses
the previous November, put such stress on the family purse, that we felt
it would be unkind to ask the old Squire to send four of us to the
village Academy that spring, as had been planned.

"We shall have to wait another year," Theodora said soberly.

"It will always be 'another year' with us, I guess!" Ellen exclaimed
sadly.

But during March that spring, a shrewd stroke of mother wit, on the part
of Addison, greatly relieved the situation and, in fact, quite set us on
our feet in the matter of funds. This, however, requires a bit of
explanation.

For fifty years grandsir Cranston had lavished his love and care on the
old Cranston farm, situated three miles from our place. He had been born
there, and he had lived and worked there all his life. Year by year he
had cleared the fields of stone and fenced them with walls. The farm
buildings looked neat and well-cared for. The sixty-acre wood-lot that
stretched from the fields up to the foot of Hedgehog Ledge had been
cleaned and cleared of undergrowth until you could drive a team from end
to end of it, among the three hundred or more immense old sugar maples
and yellow birches.

That wood-lot, indeed, had been the old farmer's special pride. He loved
those big old-growth maples, loved them so well that he would not tap
them in the spring for maple sugar. It shortened the lives of trees, he
said, to tap them, particularly large old trees.

It was therefore distressing to see how, after grandsir Cranston died,
the