gh Mrs. Gammit's mind. Could Joe Barron have been right? _Was_ it
weasels, after all, that were taking her eggs? But she dismissed the
idea at once. Joe Barron didn't know everything! And there,
indisputably, were the porcupines, bothering her all the time, with
unheard-of impudence. Weasels, indeed!

"'Twa'n't _you_ I was after," she muttered obstinately, apostrophizing
the now motionless form in the rain-barrel. "It was them dratted
porkypines, as comes after my aigs. But _ye're_ a bad lot, too, an'
I'm right glad to have got ye where ye won't be up to no mischief."

All athrill with excitement, Mrs. Gammit hurried through her morning's
chores, and allowed herself no breakfast except half a dozen violent
cups of tea "with sweetenin'." Then, satisfied that the weasel in the
rain-barrel was by this time securely and permanently dead, she fished
it out, and reset the trap in its place under the barn. The other trap
she discovered in the swill-barrel, after a long search. Relieved to
find it unbroken, she cleaned it carefully and put it away to be
returned, in due time, to its owner. She would not set it again--and,
indeed, she would have liked to smash it to bits, as a sacrifice to
the memory of poor Red Top-knot.

"I hain't got no manner o' use fer a porkypine trap what'll go out o'
its way to ketch hens," she grumbled.

The silent summer forenoon, after this, wore away without event. Mrs.
Gammit, working in her garden behind the house, with the hot, sweet
scent of the flowering buckwheat-field in her nostrils and the drowsy
hum of bees in her ears, would throw down her hoe about once in every
half-hour and run into the barn to look hopefully at the traps. But
nothing came to disturb them. Neither did anything come to disturb the
hens, who attended so well to business that at noon Mrs. Gammit had
seven fresh eggs to carry in. When night came, and neither weasels nor
porcupines had given any further sign of their existence, Mrs. Gammit
was puzzled. She was one of those impetuous women who expect
everything to happen all at once. When milking was over, and her
solitary, congenial supper, she sat down on the kitchen doorstep and
considered the situation very carefully.

What she had set herself out to do, after the interview with Joe
Barron, was to catch a porcupine in one of his traps, and thus,
according to her peculiar method of reasoning, convince the confident
woodsman that porcupines _did_ eat eggs! As for the e