Chapter III

From a mile away I turned to look back at the "cripple" where towered the tall white oak of the hawks. Both birds were wheeling about the castle nest, their noble flight full of the freedom of the marsh, their piercing cries voicing its wildness. And how free, how wild, how untouched by human hands the wide plain seemed! Sea-like it lay about me, circled southward from east to west with the rim of the sky.

I moved on toward the bay. The sun had dropped to the edge of the marsh, its level-lined shafts splintering into golden fire against the curtained windows of the lighthouse. It would soon be sunset. For some time there had been a quiet gurgling and lisping down in the grass, but it had meant nothing, until, of a sudden, I heard the rush of a wave along the beach: the tide was coming in. And with it came a breeze, a moving, briny, bay-cooled breeze that stirred the grass with a whisper of night.

Once more I had worked round to the road. It ran on ahead of me, up a bushy dune, and forked, one branch leading off to the lighthouse, the other straight out to the beach, out against the white of the breaking waves.

The evening purple was deepening on the bay when I mounted the dune. Bands of pink and crimson clouded the west, a thin cold wash of blue veiled the east; and overhead, bayward, landward, everywhere, the misting and the shadowing of the twilight.

Between me and the white wave-bars at the end of the road gleamed a patch of silvery water--the returning tide. As I watched, a silvery streamlet broke away and came running down the wheel track. Another streamlet, lagging a little, ran shining down the other track, stopped, rose, and creeping slowly to the middle of the road, spread into a second gleaming patch. They grew, met--and the road for a hundred feet was covered with the bay.

As the crimson paled into smoky pearl, the blue changed green and gold, and big at the edge of the marsh showed the rim of the moon.

Weird hour! Sunset, moonrise, flood-tide, and twilight together weaving the spell of the night over the wide waking marsh. Mysterious, sinister almost, seemed the swift, stealthy creeping of the tide. It was surrounding and crawling in upon me. Already it stood ankle-deep in the road, and was reaching toward my knees, a warm thing, quick and moving. It slipped among the grasses and into the holes of the crabs with a smothered bubbling; it disturbed the seaside sparrows sleeping down in the sedge and kept them springing up to find new beds. How high would it rise? Behind me on the road it had crawled to the foot of the dune. Would it let me through to the mainland if I waited for the flood?

It would be high tide at nine o'clock. Finding a mound of sand on the shore that the water could hardly cover, I sat down to watch the tide-miracle; for here, surely, I should see the wonder worked, so wide was the open, so full, so frank the moon.

In the yellow light I could make out the line of sentinel trees across the marsh, and off on the bay a ship, looming dim in the distance, coming on with wind and tide. There were no sounds except the long regular wash of the waves, the stir of the breeze in the chafing sedges, and the creepy stepping of the water weaving everywhere through the hidden paths of the grass. Presently a night-hawk began to flit about me, then another and another, skimming just above the marsh as silent as the shadows. What was that? Something moved across the moon. In a moment, bat-like and huge against the great yellow disk, appeared a marsh-owl. He was coming to look at me. What was I that dared remain abroad in the marsh after the rising of the moon? that dared invade this eery realm, this night-spread, tide-crept, half-sealand where he was king? How like a goblin he seemed! I thought of Grendel, and listened for the splash of the fen-monster's steps along the edge of the bay. But only the owl came. Down, down, down he bobbed, till I could almost feel the fanning of his wings. How silent! His long legs hung limp, his body dangled between those soft wide wings within reach of my face. Yet I heard no sound. Mysterious creature! I was glad when he ceased his ghostly dance about me and made off.

It was nine o'clock. The waves had ceased to wash against the sand, for the beach was gone; the breeze had died away; the stir of the water in the grass was still. Only a ripple broke now and then against my little island. The bay and the marsh were one.

How still the plains of the waters be!
The tide is in his ecstasy.
The tide is at his highest height:
And it is night.

CALICO AND THE KITTENS

CALICO AND THE KITTENS

One spring day I found myself the sole help of two blind, naked infants--as near a real predicament as a man could well get. What did it matter that they had long tails and were squirrels? They were infants just the same; and any kind of an infant on the hands of any mere man is a real tragedy.

As I looked at the two callow things in the grass, a dismay and weak helplessness quite overcame me. The way they squirmed and shivered and squeaked worked upon me down even to my knees. I felt sick and foolish. Both of their parents were dead. Their loose leaf-nest overhead had been riddled with shot. I had climbed up and found them; I had brought them down; I must--feed them! The other way of escape were heathen.

But how could I feed them? Nipples, quills, spoons--none of them would fit these mites of mouths. What a miserable mother I was! How poorly equipped for foundlings! They were dying for lack of food; and as they pawed about and whimpered in my hands I devoutly wished the shot had put them all out of misery together. I was tempted to turn heathen and despatch them.

Unhappy but resolute, I started homeward, determined to rear those squirrels, if it could be done. On my way I remembered--and it came to me with a shock--that one of my neighbor's cats had a new batch of kittens. They were only a few days old. Might not Calico, their mother, be induced to adopt the squirrels!

Nothing could be more absurd. The kittens were three times larger than the squirrels. Even had they been the same size, did I think the old three-colored cat could be fooled? that she might not know a kitten of hers from some other mother's--squirrel? I was desperate indeed. Calico was a hunter. She had eaten more gray squirrels, perhaps, than I had ever seen. She would think I had been foraging for her--the mother of seven green kittens!--and would take my charges as titbits. Still I was determined to try.

My neighbor's kittens were enough and to spare. One of Calico's last year's lot still waited a good home; and here were seven more to be cared for. Might not two of these be spirited away, far away; the two squirrels substituted, and the old cat be none the wiser?

I went home by way of my neighbor's, and found Calico in the basement curled up asleep with her babies. She roused and purred questioningly as we bent over the basket, and watched with concern, but with no anxiety, as two of her seven were lifted out and put inside a hat upon a table. She was perfectly used to having her kittens handled. True, strange things had happened to them. But that was long ago; and there had been so very many kittens that no one mother could remember about them all. She trusted us--with an ear pricked and eyes watchful. But they were safe, and in a prideful, self-conscious, young-mother way she began to wash the five.

Some one stood between her and the hat when the kittens were lifted out and the squirrels were put in their place. Calico did not see. For a time she thought no more about them; she was busy washing and showing the others. By and by it began to look as though she had forgotten that there were more than five. She could not count. But most mothers can _number_ their children, even if they cannot count, and soon Calico began to fidget, looking up at the hat which the hungry, motherless squirrels kept rocking. Then she leaped out upon the floor, purring, and bounded upon the table, going straight to the young squirrels.

There certainly was an expression of surprise and mystification on her face as she saw the change that had come over those kittens. They had shrunk and faded from two or three bright colors to a single pale pink. She looked again and sniffed them. Their odor had changed, too. She turned to the watchers about the table, but they said nothing. She hardly knew what to think. She was half inclined to leave them and go back to the basket, when one of the squirrels whimpered--a genuine, universal baby whimper. That settled it. She was a mother, and whatever else these things in the hat might be, they were babies. That was enough, especially as she needed just this much baby here in the hat to make good what was lacking in the basket.

With a soft, caressing purr she stepped gently into the hat, took one of the squirrels by the neck, brought it to the edge of the table, and laid it down for a firmer hold; then sprang lightly to the floor. Over to the basket she walked and dropped it tenderly among her other babies. Then, having brought the remaining one and deposited that with the same mother-care, she got into the basket herself and curled down contentedly--her heart all whole.

And this is how strange a thing mother-love is! The performance was scarcely believable. Could she be so love-blind as not to see what they were and not eat them? But when she began to lick the little interlopers and cuddle them down to their dinner as if they were her own genuine kittens, there could be no more doubt or fear.

The squirrels do not know to this day that Calico is not their real mother. From the first they took her mother's milk and mother's love as rightfully and thanklessly as the kittens, growing, not like the kittens at all, but into the most normal of squirrels, round and fat and splendid-tailed.

Calico clearly recognized some difference between the two kinds of kittens, but _what_ difference always puzzled her. She would clean up a kitten and comb it slick, then turn to one of the squirrels and wash it, but rarely, if ever, completing the work because of some disconcerting un-catlike antic. As the squirrels grew older they also grew friskier, and soon took the washing as the signal for a frolic. As well try to wash a bubble. They were bundles of live springs, twisting out of her paws, dancing over her back, leaping, kicking, tumbling as she had never seen a kitten do in all her richly kittened experience.

I don't know why, but Calico was certainly fonder of these two freaks than of her own normal children. Long after the latter were weaned she nursed and mothered the squirrels. I have frequently seen them let into the kitchen when the old cat was there, and the moment they got through the door they would rush toward her, dropping chestnuts or cookies by the way. She in turn would hurry to meet them with a little purr of greeting full of joy and affection. They were shamefully big for such doings. The kittens had quit it long ago. Calico herself, after a while, came to feel the impropriety of mothering these strapping young ones, and in a weak, indulgent way tried to stop it. But the squirrels were persistent and would not go about their business at all with an ordinary cuff. She would put them off, run away from them, slap them, and make believe to bite; but not until she did bite, and sharply too, would they be off. All this seemed very strange and unnatural; yet a stranger thing happened one day, when Calico brought in to her family a full-grown gray squirrel which she had caught in the woods. She laid it down on the floor and called the kittens and squirrels to gather around. They came, and as the squirrels sniffed at the dead one on the floor there was hardly a mark of difference in their appearance. It might have been one of Calico's own nursing that lay there dead, so far as any one save Calico could see. And with her the difference, I think, was more of smell than of sight. But she knew her own; and though she often found her two out among the trees of the yard, she never was mistaken, nor for an instant made as if to hurt them.

Yet they could not have been more entirely squirrel had their own squirrel mother nurtured them. Calico's milk and love went all to cat in her own kittens, and all to squirrel in these that she adopted. No single hair of theirs turned from its squirrel-gray to any one of Calico's three colors; no single squirrel trait became the least bit catlike.

Indeed, as soon as the squirrels could run about they forsook the clumsy-footed kittens under the stove and scampered up back of the hot-water tank, where they built a nest. Whenever Calico entered the kitchen purring, out would pop their heads, and down they would come, understanding the mother language as well as the kittens, and usually beating the kittens to the mother's side.

So far from teaching them to climb and build nests behind water-tanks, their foster-mother never got over her astonishment at it. All they needed from her, all they needed and would have received from their own squirrel mother, was nourishment and protection until their teeth and legs grew strong. Wits were born with them; experience was sure to come to them; and with wits and experience there is nothing known among squirrels of their kind that these two would not learn for themselves.

And there was not much known to squirrels that these two did not know, apparently without even learning. As they grew in size they increased exceedingly in naughtiness, and were banished shortly from the kitchen to an ell or back woodshed. They celebrated this distinction by dropping some hickory-nuts into a rubber boot hanging on the wall, and then gnawing a hole through the toe of the boot in order to extract the hidden nuts. Was it mischief that led them to gnaw through rather than go down the top? Or did something get stuffed into the top of the boot after the nuts were dropped in? And did the squirrels _remember_ that the nuts were in there, or did they _smell_ them through the rubber?

One woodshed is big enough only for two squirrels. The family moved everything out but the wood, and the squirrels took possession for the winter. Their first nest had been built behind the hot-water tank. They knew _how_ to build without any teaching. But knowing how is not all there is to know about building; knowing _where_ is very important, and this they had to learn.

Immediately on coming to the woodshed the squirrels began their winter nest, a big, bulky, newspaper affair, which they placed up in the northwest corner of the shed directly under the shingles. Here they slept till late in the fall. This was the shaded side and the most exposed corner of the whole house; but all went well until one night when the weather suddenly turned very cold. A strong wind blew from the northwest hard upon the squirrels' nest.

The next day there was great activity in the woodshed--a scampering of lively feet, that began early in the morning and continued far toward noon. The squirrels were moving. They gathered up their newspaper nest and carried it--diagonally--across the shed from the shaded northwest to the sunny southeast corner, where they rebuilt and slept snug throughout the winter.

Calico did not teach them this; neither would their own squirrel mother have taught them. They knew how, to begin with. They knew _where_ after one night of experience, which in this case had to be a night of shivers.

THE SPARROW ROOST

THE SPARROW ROOST

An early December twilight was settling over Boston, a thick foggy murk that soaked down full of smoke and smell and chill. The streets were oozy with a wet snow which had fallen through the afternoon and had been trodden into mud; and draughty with an east wind, that would have passed unnoticed across the open fields, but which drew up these narrow flues and sent a shiver down one's back in spite of coats. It was half-past five. The stores were closing, their clerks everywhere eddying into the noisy streams of wheels and hoofs still pouring up and down. The traffic tide had turned, but had not yet ebbed away.

And this was evening! the coming night! I moved along with the crowd, homesick for the wideness and quiet of the country, for the soughing of the pines, the distant bang of a barn door, the night cry of guineas from some neighboring farm, when, in the hurry and din, I caught the cry of bird voices, and looking up, found that I had stumbled upon a bird roost--at the very heart of the city! I was in front of King's Chapel Burial Ground, whose half-dozen leafless trees were alive with noisy sparrows.

The crowd swept on. I halted behind a waste-barrel by the iron fence and forgot the soughing pines and clacking guineas.

Bird roosts of this size are no common find. I remember a huge fireplace chimney that stood near my home, into which a cloud of swallows used to swarm for a few nights preceding the fall migration; I lived some years close to the pines at the head of Cubby Hollow, where great flocks of crows slept nightly throughout the winter; but these, besides now and again a temporary resting-place, a mere caravansary along the route of the migrants, were all I had happened upon. Here was another, bordering a city street, overhanging the street, with a blazing electric light to get into bed by!

Protected by the barrel from the jostle on the sidewalk, I waited by the ancient graveyard until the electric lights grew bright, until every fussing sparrow was quiet, until I could see only little gray balls and blurs in the trees through the misty drizzle that came down with the night. Then I turned toward my own snug roost, five flights up, next the roof, and just a block away, as the sparrows fly, from this roost of theirs. I was glad to have them so near me.

The windows of my roost look out over roofs of slate, painted tin, and tarry pebbles, into a chimney-fenced plot of sky. Occasionally, during the winter, a herring-gull from the harbor swims into this bit of smoky blue; frequently a pigeon, sometimes a flock, sails past; and in the summer dusk, after the swallows quit it, a city-haunting night-hawk climbs out of the forest of chimney-pots, up, up above the smoke for his booming roofward swoop. But winter and summer, save along through June, the sparrows, as evening falls, cut across the sky field on their way to the roost in the old burial-ground. There go two, there twoscore in a whirling, scudding flurry, like a swift-blown bunch of autumn leaves. For more than an hour they keep passing--till the dusk turns to darkness, till all are tucked away in bed.

One would scarcely recognize the birds as they sweep past in these flurries, their flight is so unlike their usual clumsy scuttle as they get out of one's way along the street. They are lumpish and short-winged on the street; they labor and lumber off with a sidewise twist to their bodies that reminds one of a rheumatic old dog upon the trot. What suggestion of grace or swiftness about them upon the ground? But watch them in their evening flight. It is a revelation. They rise above the houses and shoot across my sky like a charge of canister. I can almost hear them whizz. Down by the cemetery I have seen them dash into view high up in the slit of sky, dive for the trees, dart zigzag like a madly plunging kite, and hurl themselves, as soft as breaths, among the branches.

This is going to bed with a vengeance. I never saw any other birds get to roost with such velocity. It is characteristic, however; the sparrow never does anything by halves. The hurry is not caused by any mite of anxiety or fear, rather from pure excess of spirit; for after rearing three broods during the summer, he has such a superabundance of vim that a winter of foraging and fighting is welcome exercise. The strenuous life is his kind of life. When the day's hunt is over and he turns back to his bed, why not race it out with his neighbors? And so they come--chasing, dodging, tagging neck and neck, all spurting to finish first at the roost.

We may not love him; but he has constitution and snap. And these things do count.

One April morning, the 6th, I went down to the roost at three o'clock. The sparrows were sleeping soundly. It was yet night. Had the dawn been reaching up above the dark walls that shut the east away from the high tree-tops, the garish street light would have kept it dim. The trees were silent and stirless, as quiet as the graves beneath them--more quiet; in fact; for there issued from a grated hole among the tombs the sound of an anvil, deep down and muffled, but unmistakably ringing, as if Governor Winthrop were forging chains in his vault. Then came a rush, a deadened roar, and an emanation of dank gaseous breath, such as the dead alone breathe.

It was only the passing of a tool-car in the subway underneath the cemetery, and the hammering of a workman at a forge in a niche of the tunnel. But, rising out of the tombs, it was gruesome and unearthly in the night-quiet.

The sparrows did not mind the sound. Maybe it ascended as a pleasant murmur to them and shaped their dreams, as dream-stuff drifts to their sweet-voiced cousins in the meadows with the lap and lave of the streams. A carriage rolled by. The clank of hoofs disturbed none of them. Some one slammed the door of an apothecary-shop across the street, and hurried off. Not a sparrow stirred.

I was trying to see whether the birds slept with their heads beneath their wings. Apparently they did, for I could not make out a head, though some of the sleepers hung over the street within ten feet of the lamp-post. But they were all above the light, with only their breasts out of the shadows, and to be certain I must make a bird move. Finding that the noises were not likely to arouse them, I threw a stick against one of the laden limbs. There were heads then, plenty of them, and every one, evidently, had been turned back and buried in the warm wing-coverts.

My stick hit very near the toes of one of the sparrows, and he flew. There was a twitter, then a stir all over the tree; but nothing further happening, they tucked in their heads again and went back to bed.

I waited. At four o'clock they still slept. The moon had swung out from behind the high buildings and now hung just above the slender spire of Park Street Church, looking down into the deep, narrow street gulch. A cat picked her way among the graves, sprang noiselessly to the top of a flat tomb beneath the sparrows, and watched with me. The creature brought the wilderness with her. After all, this was not so far removed from the woods. In the empty street, beneath the silent, shuttered walls, with something still of the mystery of the night winds in the bare trees, the scene, for an instant, was touched with the spell of the dark and the untamed.

After a swift warming walk of fifteen minutes I returned to the roost. There were signs of waking now: a flutter here, a twitter there, then quiet again, with no general movement until half-past four, when the city lights were shut off. Then, instantly, from a dozen branches sounded loud, clear chirps, and every sparrow opened his eyes. The incandescent bulbs about the border of the roost were moon and stars to them, lights in the firmament of their heaven to divide the night from the day. When they blazed forth, it was evening--bedtime; when they went out, it was morning--the time to wake up.

The softness of dusk, how unknown to these city dwellers! and the fresh sweet beauty of the dawn!

Morning must have begun to break along near four o'clock, for the cold gray across the sky was already passing into pearl. The country birds had been up half an hour, I am sure. However, the old cemetery was wide enough awake now. There was chirping everywhere. It grew louder and more general every moment, till shortly the six thousand voices, and more, were raised in the cheerful din--the matin, if you please, for as yet only a few of the birds were fighting.

But the fight quickly spread. It is the English sparrow's way of waking up; his way of whetting his appetite for breakfast; his way of digesting his dinner; his way of settling his supper--his normal waking way.

To the clatter of voices was added the flutter of wings; for the birds had begun to shift perches, and to exchange slaps as well as to call names--the movement setting toward the tree-tops. None of the sparrows had left the roost. The storm of chatter increased and the buzz of wings quickened into a steady whir, the noise holding its own with that of the ice-wagons pounding past. The birds were filling the top-most branches, a gathering of the clans, evidently, for the day's start. The clock in Scollay Square station pointed to five minutes to five, and just before the hour struck, two birds launched out and spun away.

The exodus had commenced. The rest of Boston was not stirring yet. It was still early; hardly a flush of warmth had washed the pearl. But the sparrows had many matters to attend to before all the milkmen and bakers got abroad: they must take their morning dust-bath, for one thing, in the worn places between the cobble-stones, before the street-sprinkler began its sloppy rounds.

There was a constant whirl out of the tree-tops now. Occasionally a bird flew off alone, but most of them left in small flocks, just as I should see them return in the evening. Doubtless the members of these flocks were the birds belonging to certain neighborhoods, those that nested and fed about certain squares, large door-yards, and leafy courts. They may indeed have been families that were hatched last summer.

The birds that left singly went away, as a rule, over the roofs toward the denser business sections of the city, while the bands, as I had noticed them come in at night, took the opposite course, toward Cambridge and Charlestown. Not more than one in a hundred flew south across the city.

Of course there are sparrows all over Boston. There is no street too narrow, too noisy, too dank with the smell of leather for them. They seem as numerous where the rush of drays is thickest as in the open breathing-places where the fountains play. They are in every quarter, yet those to the east and south of the old burial-ground do not belong to the roost. Perhaps they have graveyards of their own in their sections, though I have been unable to find them. So far as I know, this is the only roost in or about Boston. And this is the stranger since so few of the total number of the Boston sparrows sleep here. A careful estimate showed me that there could not have been more than six or seven thousand in the roost. One would almost say there were as many millions in Boston. And where do these millions sleep? For the most part, each one alone behind his sign-board or shutter near his local feeding-grounds.

Now, why should the sparrows of the roost prefer King's Chapel Burial Ground to the Old Granary, a stone's throw up the street? I passed the Old Granary yard on my way to the roost and found the trees empty. I searched the limbs with my glass; there was not a sparrow to be seen. Still, the Granary is the less exposed of the two. It may not formerly have been so; but at present high sheltering walls bend about the trees like a well. Years ago, perhaps, when the sparrows began to roost in the trees at King's Chapel, the Old Granary elms were more open to the winds, and now force of habit and example keep the birds returning to the first lodge.

Back they come, no matter what the weather. There are a thousand cozy corners into which a sparrow might creep on a stormy night, where even the winds that know their way through Boston streets could not search him out. But the instinct to do as he always has done is as strong in the sparrow, in spite of his love for pioneering, as it is in the rest of us. He was brought here to roost as soon as he could fly, when the leaves were on and the nights delicious. If the leaves go and the nights change, what of that? Here he began, here he will continue to sleep. Let it rain, blow, snow; let the sleet, like a slimy serpent, creep up the trunk and wrap around the twigs: still he will hold on. Many a night I have seen them sleeping through a driving winter rain, their breasts to the storm, their tails hanging straight down, shedding every drop. If a gale is blowing, and it is cold, they get to the leeward of the tree, as close to the trunk as possible, and anchor fast, every bill pointing into the wind, every feather reefed, every tail lying out on the flat of the storm.

As I watched the bands starting from the tree-tops of the roost I wondered if they really crossed the river into Cambridge and Charlestown. A few mornings later I was again up early, hastening down to the West Boston Bridge to see if I could discover the birds going over. As I started out I saw bunches moving toward the river with a free and easy flight, but whether I reached the bridge too late, or whether they scattered and went over singly, I do not know. Only now and then did a bird cross, and he seemed to come from along the shore rather than from above the house-tops.

I concluded that the birds of the roost were strictly Bostonians. One evening, however, about a week later, as I was upon this bridge coming from Cambridge, a flock of sparrows whizzed past me, dipped over the rail to the water, swung up above the wall of houses, and disappeared toward the roost. They were on their way from Cambridge, from the classic elms of Harvard campus, who knows, to the elms of the ancient burial-ground.

It was five that April morning when the first sparrow left the roost. By half-past five the trees were empty, except for the few birds whose hunting-ground included the cemetery. By this time the city, too, had yawned, and rubbed its eyes, and tumbled out of bed.

"MUX"

"MUX"

No, "Mux" is not an elegant name--not to to be compared with Ronald or Claudia, for instance; and I want to say it is not the name of one of my children, though its owner was once a member of my household. Mux was a tame half-grown coon, with just the ordinary number of rings around his tail, but with the most extraordinary amount of mischief in his little coon soul. Perhaps he had no real soul, and I should have located his mischief somewhere else. If so, then I should say in his feet. I never saw any other feet so expressive. The essence of the little beast seemed concentrated in his lore paws. If they made trouble, whose fault was it? They were designed for trouble. You could see this purpose in them as plainly as you could see the purpose in a swallow's wings. Whenever Mux ran across the yard these paws picked up trouble out of the turf, just as if the grass were trouble-filings, and Mux a kind of four-footed magnet. He never went far before they clogged and stopped him.

One day, the first day that Mux was given the liberty of the yard, who should he run foul of but Tom! The struggle had to come sometime, and it was just as well that it came thus early, while Tom and Mux were on an equal footing as to size, for Mux was young and growing.

Tom was boss of the yard. Every farmer's dog that went to town by our gate knew enough to pass by on the other side. Tom had grown a little lordly and opinionated. He was sleeping in the sun on the shed-step as Mux ambled up. At sight of the coon Tom rose in more than his usual feline mightiness and cast such a look of surprise, scorn, and annihilating intent upon the interloper as ought to have struck terror to the stoutest heart. But Mux hardly seemed to understand. On he came, right into certain destruction, a very lamb of innocence and meekness. O you unsuspecting little stranger! Don't you see this awful monster swelling, swelling into this hideous hump? No, Mux did not see him. Tom was raging. His teeth gleamed; his eyes blazed green; his claws worked in a nervous way that made my flesh creep. He was vanishing, not, like the Cheshire Cat, into a long lovely grin, but vanishing from a four-legged cat into a yellow, one-legged hump. All that was left of him now was hump.

Mux was only a few feet away. Tom began to advance, not directly, but just a trifle on the bias, across Mux's bows so to speak, as if to give him a broadside. They were within range. Tom was heaving to. I trembled for the young coon. Suddenly there was a hiss, a flash of yellow in the air, and--a very big surprise awaiting Thomas! That little coon was no stupid after all. He had not rolled up his sleeves, nor doubled up his fists, nor put a chip upon his shoulder; but he knew what was expected of him, just the same. He snapped instantly upon his back, received the cat with all four of his feet, and gave Mr. Tom such a combing down that his golden fur went flying off like thistle-down in autumn.

It was all over in less than half a minute. I think Tom must have made a new record for himself in the running high jump when he broke away from his ring-tailed antagonist. He struck out across the yard and landed midway up the clothes-post with a single bound. And Mux? He ambled on around the yard, as calm and unconcerned as if he had only stopped to scratch himself.

Much of this unconcern, however, was a quiet kind of swagger. When he thought no one fiercer than a chicken or the humbled Mr. Tom was looking, he would shuffle across the yard with his coat collar turned up, his hat over his eye, his elbows angled--just as if he had been born and bred on the Bowery instead of in the Bear Swamp. He was king of the yard, but I could see that he wore his crown uneasily. He kept a bold front, accepted every challenge, and even went out of his way to pick a quarrel; yet he quaked at heart continually. He feared and hated the noises of the yard, particularly the crowing of our big buff cochin rooster and the screaming of the guineas. This was one of the swamp-fears that he had brought with him and could not outlive. It haunted him. If he had a conscience, its only warnings were of coming noises great and terrible.

But Mux had no conscience, unless it was one that troubled him only when he was out of mischief. His face was never so long and so solemn as when I had caught him in some questionable act or spoiled some wayward plan.

Mux, however, was possessed by a much stubborner spirit than this interesting mischief-devil. Upon one point he was positively demented--the only four-footed maniac I ever knew. He had gone crazy on the subject of dirt, mad to wash things, especially his victuals.

He was not particular about what he ate; almost anything that could be swallowed would do, provided that it could be washed, and washed by himself, after his own approved fashion.

If I gave him half of my apple, he would squat down by his wash-tub and begin to hunt for dirt. He would look the apple over and over, pick around the blossom end, inspect carefully, then pull out the stem, if there happened to be a stem, dig out the seeds and peek into the core, then douse it into the water and begin to wash. He would rub with might and main for a second or two, then rinse it, take a bite, and douse it back again for more scrubbing, until it was scrubbed and chewed away.

Even when the water was thick with mud, this crazy coon persisted in washing his clean cake and cabbage therein. Indeed, the muddier the water, the more vigorously would he wash. The habit was a part of him, as real a thing in his constitution as the black ring in his fur. It was a very dirty habit, here in captivity, even if it went by the name of washing. Of course Mux could not be blamed for his soiled wash-water. That was my fault; only I couldn't be changing it every time he soaked up a fistful of earth in his endeavor to wash something to eat out of it. No; he was not at fault, altogether, for the mud in his tub. Out in the Bear Swamp, the streams that wandered about under the great high-spreading gums, and lost their way in the shadows, were crystal-clear and pure; and out there it was intended that he should dwell, and in those sweet streams that he should wash. But what a modicum of wit, of originality the little beast had, that, because he was born a washer, wash he must, though he washed in mud, nay, though he washed upon the upturned bottom of his empty tub!--for this is what Mux did sometimes.

I never blamed Aunt Milly for insisting upon this rather ill-sounding name of "Mux" for the little coon. She was standing by his cage, shortly after his arrival, watching him eat cabbage. He washed every clean white piece of it in his oozy tub before tasting it, coating the bits over with mud as you do the lumps of fondant with chocolate in making "chocolate creams." Aunt Milly looked at him for some time with scornful face and finally exclaimed:

"Umph! Dat animile am a dumb beast shu'! Rubbin' dirt right inter clean cabbage! Sich muxin'! mux, mux, mux! Dat a coon? Dat ain't no coon. Dat's a mux!" And she scuffed off to the house, mumbling, "De muxinest thing I done evah seen." Hence his name.

If there is one sweetmeat sweeter than all others to a coon, it is a frog. It was not mere chance that Mux was born in the edge of the Bear Swamp, close to the wide marshes that ran out to the river. This was the great country of the frogs--the milk-and-honey country to the ring-tailed family in the hollow gum. But Mux had never tasted frog. He had not been weaned when I kidnapped him. One day, wishing to see if he knew what a frog was, I carelessly offered him a big spotted fellow that I had caught in the meadow.

Did he know a frog? He fairly snatched the poor thing from me, killed it, and started around the cage with it in his mouth, dancing like a cannibal. His long, serious face was more thoughtful and solemn, however, than usual. I was puzzled. I had heard of dancing at funerals. Either this was such a dance, or else some wild orgy to propitiate the spirits that preside over the destiny of coons.

Throughout this gruesome rite Mux held the frog in his mouth, and I watched, expecting, hoping every moment that he would swallow it. Suddenly he stopped, sat down by his tub, pulled some dead grass out of it, plunged the frog in, and began to scrub it--began to scrub the frog in the oozy contents of that tub, when the poor amphibian had been soaking in spring-water ever since it was a tadpole!

No matter. The frog must be washed. And washed it was. It was scoured first with all his might, then placed in the bottom of the tub, under water, held down by one fore paw, until the maniac could get in with his hind feet upon it, and then danced upon; from here it was laid upon the floor of the cage and kneaded until as limp as a lump of dough; then lifted daintily, it was shaken round and round in the water, rinsed and wrung, and minutely inspected, and--swallowed.

I felt justified in keeping this animal caged. He was not fit to run loose even in the Bear Swamp. Perhaps I have done him wrong in this story of the frog. Frogs may need washing, after all, despite the fact that they are never out of the bath-tub long enough to dry off once in their whole lives. Mux knew more about frogs than I, doubtless. But Mux insisted upon washing oysters.

Now there are few people clothed in sane minds who do not like raw oysters. Mark this, however: when you see a person wash raw oysters, keep out of his way; he has lost either his wits or his morals. The only two creatures I ever knew to wash raw oysters were Mux and an oyster-dealer in Cambridge Street, Boston. I saw this dealer take up a two-gallon can that had just arrived at his store, and dump the dark salty shell-fish into a great colander, stick the end of a piece of rubber hose in among them, turn the water on? and stir and soak them. How white they got! How fat they got! How their ghastly corpses swelled!

Mux did not wash his to see them swell, but simply that he might take no chances with dirt--or poison, for I used to think sometimes that he thought I was trying to poison him. He was desperately fond of oysters. But who could cast his pearls, or, to be scientifically and literally correct, his mothers of pearls, before such a swine? Mux had just one plateful of oysters while I was his keeper. They were nice plump fellows, and when I saw the maniac soak one all stringy and tasteless I poured his wash-water out. Was he to be balked that way! No, no. He took oyster number two, flopped it into the empty tub, scoured it around on the muddy bottom, looked it over as carefully as he had done stringy number one, and swallowed sandy, muddy number two with just as much relish.

This was too much. I cuffed him and took away the tub. This I suppose was wrong, for I understand you must never oppose crazy persons. Well, Mux helped himself to oyster number three. There was no water, no tub. But what were oysters for if not to be washed? And who was he but _Procyon lotor_--_Procyon_ "the washer"? Can the leopard change his spots or the racoon his habits? Can he? Shall he? I could almost hear him muttering under his breath, "To be, or not to be: that is the question." Then he darted a triumphantly malicious glance at me, retreated to the back of his cage, thrust his oyster out of sight beneath the straw of his bed, and washed it--washed the oyster in the straw, washed it into a fistful of sticks and chaff, and gloated as he swallowed it.

RACOON CREEK

RACOON CREEK

Into the wode to her the briddes sing.