out of sight. It warms my feet, it also warms my
heart.

So the leaves pile up. How good a thing it is to have a pig to work
for! What zest and purpose it lends to one's raking and piling and
storing! If I could get nothing else to spend myself on, I should
surely get me a pig. Then, when I went to walk in the woods, I should
be obliged occasionally to carry a rake and a bag with me, much better
things to take into the woods than empty hands, and sure to scratch
into light a number of objects that would never come within the range
of opera-glass or gun or walking-stick. To see things through a
twenty-four-toothed rake is to see them very close, as through a
microscope magnifying twenty-four diameters.

And so, as the leaves pile up, we keep a sharp lookout for what the
rake uncovers; here under a rotten stump a hatful of acorns, probably
gathered by the white-footed wood-mouse. For the stump "gives" at the
touch of the rake, and a light kick topples it down hill, spilling out
a big nest of feathers and three dainty little creatures that scurry
into the leaf-piles like streaks of daylight. They are the
white-footed mice, long-tailed, big-eared, and as clean and
high-bred-looking as greyhounds.

Combing down the steep hillside with our rakes, we dislodge a large
stone, exposing a black patch of fibrous roots and leaf-mould, in which
something moves and disappears. Scooping up a double handful of the
mould, we capture a little red-backed salamander.

Listen! Something piping! Above the rustle of the leaves we, too,
hear a "fine, plaintive" sound--no, a shrill and ringing little racket,
rather, about the bigness of a penny whistle.

Dropping the rake, we cautiously follow up the call (it seems to speak
out of every tree-trunk!) and find the piper clinging to a twig, no
salamander at all, but a tiny wood-frog. Pickering's hyla, his little
bagpipe blown almost to bursting as he tries to rally the scattered
summer by his tiny, mighty "skirl." Take him nose and toes, he is
surely as much as an inch long; not very large to pipe against this
north wind that has been turned loose in the bare woods.

We go back to our raking. Above us, among the stones of the slope,
hang bunches of Christmas fern; around the foot of the trees we uncover
trailing clusters of gray-green partridge vine, glowing with crimson
berries; we rake up the prince's-pine, pipsissewa, creeping-Jennie, and
wintergreen red with ripe berries--a