'ti}t &(x'^ of ii}t ^anb 



holes on these fourteen acres. Now forty-six wood- 

 chuck holes are a good many holes, but I have been 

 these five years counting them. Only two of them 

 are in the open, and visible from the road. Driving 

 past, I say, you might actually think I had no wood- 

 chucks at all ! 



You should stop all summer and milk for me some 

 morning. Throughout the early part of the season I 

 had left the kitchen with my milk-pail rather late, — 

 a little after five o'clock. One morning in September 

 I stepped out of the door a little before five, and 

 there in the clover close to the stoop sat a fine old 

 woodchuck. I stood still and watched him. He was 

 not expecting me yet, for he knew my comings out 

 and goings in. He was up to his eyes in the clover, 

 and he neither saw nor heard me. 



Here about the kitchen door he had fed since the 

 clover started, and I had not known it. He had 

 timed his breakfast so as to be through by five 

 o'clock, — before I came out. Had I been a boarder, 

 with no cow to milk, perhaps I never should have 

 known it. But after that morning I saw him fre- 

 quently. I took pains to get up with him. Just over 

 the edge of the lawn, about five feet down the wooded 



204 



