tocking 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 other common animals were likely to make,--a sound
that might be either a gnawing on some hard, dry substance, or a
grating of teeth, or a shrill grunti