gain, old fellow," she exclaimed, before
breakfast one morning after the recusant batrachian had been transported
the night before. This time the old lady seized the tongs herself, and
marched out into the yard, holding toady with no gentle pinch on his
rotund body.

"Ellen, you bring me a quart of that brine out of the beef barrel," she
called back to the kitchen.

Then having put the toad down in the cart road leading out into the
fields, she dashed him with brine, and as he hopped away pursued him
with further douches.

It is not likely that the brine injured the reptile very much, but for
some reason it never came back.

For a long time thereafter the Old Squire was accustomed to touch up
Gram's conscience now and then, by making sly allusion to her
hard-heartedness and cruelty in "pickling toads." The Old Squire, too,
had his bucolic enemies as well as Gram.

Wheet-wh-wh-wh-wh-wheedle! was a note we now began to hear daily about
the stone walls and in the fields of new clover.

"Oh, those wood-chucks!" the old gentleman would exclaim. "They are
making shocking work over in that new piece. Boys, I'll give you five
cents a head for every wood-chuck you will kill off."

Amidst the now rapidly blossoming red clover we could see the fresh
earth of numbers of their burrows, and almost every day a new one would
be espied beside a rock or stone heap. June is the happy month for
wood-chucks, in New England; they riot in the farmer's clover, and
tunnel the soft hillsides with their holes. June is the month, too, when
mother wood-chuck is leading out her four or five chubby little chucks,
teaching them the fear of dogs and man, which constitutes the wisdom of
a wood-chuck's life, and giving them their first lesson in that shrill,
yet guttural note peculiar to wood-chuckdom, which country boys call
"whistling."

It is remarkable how many wood-chucks will not only get a living, but
wax fat on an old farm where the farmer himself has difficulty in making
year's ends meet. Addison estimated that at one time there were seventy
wood-chucks on the Old Squire's homestead, all prosperous and laying by
something, metaphorically speaking, for a rainy day.

Despite all the evil that is said of the wood-chuck, too, he does in
reality a much smaller amount of damage to man than one would imagine
from the outcry against him. Occasionally, it is true, a chuck will
begin nibbling at early pease, or beans, and do real, measurable ha