s trail,
on so far that though I waited several minutes, not one of the dogs had
discovered the trick to come back on the right lead.

If I had had a _gun_! Yes, but I did not. But if I _had_ had a gun,
it might have made no particular difference. Yet it is the gun that
makes the difference--all the difference between much or little wild
life--life that our groves and fields may have at our hands now, as
once the forests and prairies had it directly from the hands of the
Lord.

[Illustration: Our calendar]

XIII

OUR CALENDAR

There are four red-lettered calendars about the house: one with the
Sundays in red; one with Sundays and the legal holidays in red; one with
the Thursdays in red,--Thursday being publication day for the periodical
sending out the calendar,--and one, our own calendar, with several sorts
of days in red--all the high festival days here on Mullein Hill, the last
to be added being the Pup's birthday which falls on September 15.

Pup's Christian name is Jersey,--because he came to us from that dear
land by express when he was about the size of two pounds of sugar,--an
explanation that in no manner accounts for all we went through in naming
him. The christening hung fire from week to week, everybody calling him
anything, until New Year's. It had to stop here. Returning from the
city New Year's day I found, posted on the stand of my table-lamp, the
cognomen done in red, this declaration:--

January 1, 1915

No person can call Jersey any other name but JERSEY. If anybody calls
him any other name but Jersey, exceeding five times a day he will have to
clean out his coop two times a day.

This was as plain as if it had been written on the wall. Somebody at
last had spoken, and not as the scribes, either.

We shall celebrate Jersey's first birthday September 15, and already on
the calendar the day is red--red, with the deep deep red of our six
hearts! He is just a dog, a little roughish-haired mixed
Scotch-and-Irish terrier, not big enough yet to wrestle with a woodchuck,
but able to shake our affections as he shakes a rat. And that is because
I am more than half through with my fourscore years and this is my first
dog! And the boys--this is their first dog, too, every stray and tramp
dog that they have brought home, having wandered off again.

One can hardly imagine what that means exactly. Of course, we have had
other things, chickens and pigs and calves, rabbits, turtles, b