strained it by the variety of ways in which he informed me
of his undying hatred of me and of his intention there and then to have
it out with me.

As he climbed to the fork, I fled out the great horizontal limb. He
followed me, and out I went, farther and farther. At last I was out
amongst the small twigs and leaves. The Chatterer was ever a coward, and
greater always than any anger he ever worked up was his caution. He was
afraid to follow me out amongst the leaves and twigs. For that matter,
his greater weight would have crashed him through the foliage before he
could have got to me.

But it was not necessary for him to reach me, and well he knew it, the
scoundrel! With a malevolent expression on his face, his beady eyes
gleaming with cruel intelligence, he began teetering. Teetering!--and
with me out on the very edge of the bough, clutching at the twigs that
broke continually with my weight. Twenty feet beneath me was the earth.

Wildly and more--wildly he teetered, grinning at me his gloating hatred.
Then came the end. All four holds broke at the same time, and I fell,
back-downward, looking up at him, my hands and feet still clutching the
broken twigs. Luckily, there were no wild pigs under me, and my fall was
broken by the tough and springy bushes.

Usually, my falls destroy my dreams, the nervous shock being sufficient
to bridge the thousand centuries in an instant and hurl me wide awake
into my little bed, where, perchance, I lie sweating and trembling and
hear the cuckoo clock calling the hour in the hall. But this dream of my
leaving home I have had many times, and never yet have I been awakened
by it. Always do I crash, shrieking, down through the brush and fetch up
with a bump on the ground.

Scratched and bruised and whimpering, I lay where I had fallen. Peering
up through the bushes, I could see the Chatterer. He had set up a
demoniacal chant of joy and was keeping time to it with his teetering.
I quickly hushed my whimpering. I was no longer in the safety of the
trees, and I knew the danger I ran of bringing upon myself the hunting
animals by too audible an expression of my grief.

I remember, as my sobs died down, that I became interested in watching
the strange light-effects produced by partially opening and closing my
tear-wet eyelids. Then I began to investigate, and found that I was not
so very badly damaged by my fall. I had lost some hair and hide, here
and there; the sharp and jagged end of