cnar.x A LITTLE BROTHER OF THE BEAR 289 
milky condition of sweet half-ripeness which so 
attracts the squirrels, the mice, the birds and — 
you and me, if you please; and when he has 
found it he strips back the husk as deftly as any 
“neat-handed Phyllis,” and disposes of the succu- 
lent kernels with ease and rapidity. This is his 
occupation and delight in the still hot August 
nights, and no one has pictured it forth to our im- 
agination as delicately as does Rowland Robinson 
in his “ New England Fields and Woods” : 
“Above the katydid’s strident cry and the 
piper’s [green cricket’s] incessant notes, a wild, 
tremulous whinny shivers through the gloom at 
intervals, now from a distant field or wood, now 
from the near orchard. One listener will tell you 
that it is only a little screech-owl’s voice, another 
that it is the raccoon’s rallying-cry to a raid on the 
cornfield. There is endless disputation concerning 
it, and apparently no certainty, but the raccoon is 
wilder than the owl, and it is his voice that you hear. 
“The corn is in the milk; the beast is ready. 
The father and mother and well-grown children, 
born and reared in the cavern of a ledge or hollow 
tree of a swamp, are hungry for sweets remem- 
bered or yet untasted, and they are gathering to 
it, stealing out of the thick darkness of the woods 
and along the brookside in single file, never stop- 
ping to dig a fiery wake-robin bulb, nor to catch a 
frog, nor to harry a late brood of ground-nesting 
birds, but only to call some laggard, or distant 
U 
