k of
an elm-tree, its roots hidden in the brushwood, its upper end projecting
into the grass and weeds of the glade. As the colt stood wondering, a
thickset, short-legged, grayish coloured animal, covered with long,
bristling quills, emerged from the leafage and came crawling down the
trunk toward him. It looked no larger than the black-and-white dog which
the colt was accustomed to seeing about the farmyard, but its fierce
little eyes and its formidable quills made him extremely nervous.

[Illustration: "HIS APPREHENSIVE EARS CAUGHT A CURIOUS SOUND."]

The porcupine came directly at him, with an ill-natured squeaking grunt.
The colt backed away a foot or two, snorting, then held his ground. He
had never yielded ground to the black-and-white dog. Why should he be
afraid of this clumsy little creature? But when, at last, the porcupine
drew so near that he could have touched it with his outstretched nose,
instead of making any such great mistake as that he flung his head high
in air, wheeled about, and lashed out furiously with his hinder hoofs.
One hoof caught the porcupine fairly on the snout and sent it whirling
end over end into the thicket, where it lay stretched out lifeless, as a
feast for the first hungry prowler that might chance by. Not greatly
elated by his victory, the magnitude of which he in no way realized, the
colt plunged again into the woods and continued his journey.

By this time the sun had dropped completely behind the wooded hills, and
here in the deep forest the dark seemed to come on all at once. The
colt's fears now crowded upon him so thickly that he could hardly make
any progress at all. He was kept busy staring this way and that, and
particularly over his shoulders. A mass of shadow, denser than the
rest,--a stump, a moss-grown boulder,--would seem to his frightened eyes
a moving shape, just about to spring upon him. He would jump to one
side, his baby heart pounding between his ribs, only to see another and
huger shadow on the other side, and jump back again. The sudden
scurrying of a wood-mouse over the dry spruce-needles made his knees
tremble beneath him. At last, coming to two tall, straight-trunked
saplings growing close together just before the perpendicular face of a
great rock, he was vaguely reminded of the cow-stanchions near his
mother's stall in the barn. To his quivering heart this was in some way
a refuge, as compared with the terrible spaciousness of the forest. He
could not