If it
had been a little dog that had chanced to wander that way, when he
crossed my path he would have followed it up to the barn and have gone
smelling around for a bone; but this sharp, cautious track held
straight across all others, keeping five or six rods from the house, up
the hill, across the highway towards a neighboring farmstead, with its
nose in the air and its eye and ear alert, so to speak.
A winter neighbor of mine in whom I am interested, and who perhaps
lends me his support after his kind, is a little red owl, whose retreat
is in the heart of an old apple-tree just over the fence. Where he
keeps himself in spring and summer I do not know, but late every fall,
and at intervals all winter, his hiding-place is discovered by the jays
and nut-hatches, and proclaimed from the tree-tops for the space of
half an hour or so, with all the powers of voice they can command.
Four times during one winter they called me out to behold this little
ogre feigning sleep in his den, sometimes in one apple-tree, sometimes
in another.
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