some corn that was fastened cunningly to the pan by fine wire.

When I took the jay carefully from the trap he played possum,
lying limp in my hand till my grip relaxed, when he flew to a
branch over my head, squalling and upbraiding me for having
anything to do with such abominable inventions.

I hung the trap to a low limb of the cedar, with a note in its
jaws telling Johnnie to come and see me next day. He came at
dusk, shamefaced, and I read him a lecture on fair play and the
difference between a thieving mink and an honest partridge. But
he chuckled over the bluejay, and I doubted the withholding power
of a mere lecture; so, to even matters, I hinted of an otter
slide I had discovered, and of a Saturday afternoon tramp
together. Twenty times, he told me, he had tried to snare the old
beech partridge. When he saw the otter slide he forswore traps
and snares for birds; and I left the place, soon after, with good
hopes for the grouse, knowing that I had spiked the guns of his
most dangerous enemy.

Years later I crossed the old pasture and went straight to the
bullbrier tangle. There were tracks of a grouse in the snow,-
-blunt tracks that rested lightly on the soft whiteness, showing
that Nature remembered his necessity and had caused his new
snowshoes to grow famously. I hurried to the brook, a hundred
memories thronging over me of happy days and rare sights when the
wood folk revealed their little secrets. In the midst of
them--kwit! kwit! and with a thunder of wings a grouse whirred
away, wild and gray as the rare bird that lived there years
before. And when I questioned a hunter, he said: "That ol' beech