ce. Yet I heard no sound. Mysterious creature! I was glad
when he ceased his ghostly dance about me and made off.

It was nine o'clock. The waves had ceased to wash against the sand, for
the beach was gone; the breeze had died away; the stir of the water in the
grass was still. Only a ripple broke now and then against my little
island. The bay and the marsh were one.

How still the plains of the waters be!
The tide is in his ecstasy.
The tide is at his highest height:
And it is night.

CALICO AND THE KITTENS

[Illustration]

CALICO AND THE KITTENS

One spring day I found myself the sole help of two blind, naked
infants--as near a real predicament as a man could well get. What did it
matter that they had long tails and were squirrels? They were infants just
the same; and any kind of an infant on the hands of any mere man is a real
tragedy.

As I looked at the two callow things in the grass, a dismay and weak
helplessness quite overcame me. The way they squirmed and shivered and
squeaked worked upon me down even to my knees. I felt sick and foolish.
Both of their parents were dead. Their loose leaf-nest overhead had been
riddled with shot. I had climbed up and found them; I had brought them
down; I must--feed them! The other way of escape were heathen.

But how could I feed them? Nipples, quills, spoons--none of them would fit
these mites of mouths. What a miserable mother I was! How poorly equipped
for foundlings! They were dying for lack of food; and as they pawed about
and whimpered in my hands I devoutly wished the shot had put them all out
of misery together. I was tempted to turn heathen and despatch them.

Unhappy but resolute, I started homeward, determined to rear those
squirrels, if it could be done. On my way I remembered--and it came to me
with a shock--that one of my neighbor's cats had a new batch of kittens.
They were only a few days old. Might not Calico, their mother, be induced
to adopt the squirrels!

Nothing could be more absurd. The kittens were three times larger than the
squirrels. Even had they been the same size, did I think the old
three-colored cat could be fooled? that she might not know a kitten of
hers from some other mother's--squirrel? I was desperate indeed. Calico
was a hunter. She had eaten more gray squirrels, perhaps, than I had ever
seen. She would think I had been foraging for her--the mother of seven
green kittens!--and wo