THE SEVEN SLEEPERS 177 
The Chipmunk and the Woodchuck, 
The Skunk, who’s slow but sure, 
The ringed Raccoon, who hates the moon, 
Have found for cold the cure. 
Something of the lives of these our brethren of 
the wild I have tried to set forth here — because I 
care for them all. 
First comes the slyest, the shyest, and the stillest 
of the Seven — the blackbear, who yet dwells among 
men when his old-time companions, the timber-wolf 
and the panther, have been long gone. Silent as a 
shadow, he is with us far oftener than we know. 
Only a few years ago bears were found in New Jersey, 
in dense cedar-swamps, unsuspected by a generation 
of near-by farmers. In Pennsylvania and New York 
they are increasing, and I have no doubt that they 
can still be found in parts of New England, from 
which they are supposed to have disappeared a half- 
century ago. In fact, it is always unsafe to say that 
any of the wild-folk have gone forever. I have lived 
to see a herd of seven Virginia deer feeding in my 
neighbor’s cabbage-patch in Connecticut, although 
neither my father nor my grandfather ever saw a 
wild deer in that state. In that same township I 
once had a fleeting glimpse of an otter, and only last 
winter, within thirty miles of Philadelphia, I located 
a colony of beaver. 
The blackbear is nearly as black as a blacksnake, 
whose color is as perfect a standard of absolute black 
on earth as El Nath is of white among the stars. 
