wickeder-lookin', with a more crooked beak, an' feathers of a dirty brownish-gray. At the time I thought Tim was jest a-humbuggin', but after the little beast disappeared so unaccountable like, I begun to reckon it must be true, sure enough."

"Oh, Wash, I can't bear to think of it!" and Monny's face looked quite pale in the moonlight. "Poor, dear little Cotton Ball! Fancy that demon and his mate tearing her limb from limb. It 'most breaks my heart." And long after the girl had climbed the ladder leading to the low attic under the clapboard roof, which she had shared with the younger children ever since their mother's death one year before, she lingered at the tiny two-paned window gazing off at the peaceful-seeming hills, but in imagination following the lost lambkin to the eagle's grim eyrie on wild, inaccessible Snaggle-Tooth Rock.

"It is dreadful, dreadful; but I won't tell Jemima Calline," was her last thought as she crept into bed beside her sister.

For Monongahela was old beyond her fourteen years, and bravely strove to fill the place of their lost parent to the motherless little ones, sending them trim and tidy to school and "Methody meetin'," feeding them on plenty of bacon, corn-dodgers, and apple-butter, and every morning, in spite of grimaces, dosing them all round with "whiskey and burdock" as an antidote against dyspepsia, the curse of that hog-eating, excessive coffee-drinking community.

Within a few days Washington's fears were painfully confirmed. Our young mountain folk were out one afternoon on the hill-side gathering ginseng and other herbs, when they met the circuit-rider who visited in turn the churches of their vicinity, and whom Mr. Saunders had frequently entertained. He paused for a chat, and informed them of the consternation created in a neighboring valley by the appearance of the terrible bird to prey upon any poultry or small animals left out over night; while one man had been severely wounded in an almost hand-to-claw tussle in order to save his dog.

The following morning, then, when Monny, with the baby toddling by her side, went out early to milk the cow, she heard a continuous firing, and came upon her brother armed with the old flint-lock rifle which he had inherited from his grandfather, popping away at the brown and purple cones on the top of a tall pine-tree, and deftly snapping off the one at which he aimed nine times out of ten.

"Well, Washington Beauregard, I'll allow you are a pretty fair marksman," she remarked, after a moment of admiring watching. "Not many private hunters kin wing a bird as well as you, kin they?"

"Reckon I could hold my own agin most of they-uns if I only had a new-fangled gun," returned the boy. "This old fowlin'-piece ain't wurth much, and I do hope I kin sell enough 'sang'[1] this year to buy another. 'Tain't much fun to git a fine aim at a buck and lose him 'cause your gun misses fire. As it is, though, I believe I could snip a curl off the baby's head an' hardly scare the darlin'. Jest hold him up, honey, an' let me hev a try." But to this William Tell arrangement Monny objected in horror, and scurried off with the infant, followed by Wash's roar of laughter and shout of "Ho, scare rabbit! But anyhow I mean to keep in practice,'n' hev a cold-lead welcome ready for that air eagle if he ever shows hisself this way agin."

The bird did not come; but about noon Tim Harkins did, ambling along on a rawboned sorrel nag, and reined up at the gate with a long-drawn-out "Whoa, thar'!"

"Wash Saunders! Oh, Wash!" he called, and that youth, rising from the dinner-table, appeared in the ramshackle porch.

"Hello, Tim, is that you? Step in an' hev a bite, won't yer?"

"No, thankee. I'm jest on my way to a gander-pull over nigh the Springs, 'n' on'y stopped to fotch you a message. Ye wouldn't keer, naow, to hire out for a few weeks, at a dollar a day, would yer?"

"What to do?"

"Oh, jest to show a gentleman through the mountings, an' pint out the hants o' the wild birds. 'Pears this Perfessor, as they call him, is stoppin' over to the Spring Hotel, an' the landlord, Poke Dickson, axed me ef I knowed any o' the neighborhood boys who would like the job. Somenn what wuz a first-rate shot, an' 'quainted with all the trails. Yaas, I tole him Wash Saunders am the very chap, ef you kin git him. But, I added, the Saunders air pooty ticky, an' Wash, mebbe, won't relish playin' pinter-dorg to any one. For, sez I, his pappy am a forehanded man, who keeps his fambly comf'ble. He hez a good corn 'n' tobaccy field, 'n' the gyurls hez a kyarpet on the best room, 'n' curtings to the windys, 'n' everything mighty slick. Still, sez I, 'twon't do no harm to ax, so here I be."

"Sho, Tim, you know I ain't so ticky as that. Dunno but I'd like it first rate, for I'm strivin' to get a new rifle. Granddaddy's old 'Sally Blazer,' as he used to name it, is about played out."

"Waal, naow, then, here's your chance, 'n' I'm real tickled. But I must be ajoggin'. G'lang, Juniper! Shall I tell Poke you will go over 'n' see the Perfessor?"

"Yes, I will, this very evenin'"; which the boy did, and returned jubilant. "It's a snap, a reg'lar snap," he declared to the group of brothers and sisters who ran to meet him. "Professor Stuart is real quality, an' no mistake. He's an orni—orni—waal, I don't rightly remember the name, but he's plumb crazy about birds, 'n' comed here a purpose to see those what live in West Virginia. It's a curous notion, but he's nice, 'n' so is Mis' Stuart, though she lies on a sofy most of the time, and looks drefful white 'n' pindlin'."

"Air there any chilluns?" inquired Jemima Calline.

"Yaas, two. An awful pooty gyurl, with eyes like brown stars, an' all rigged out in white, same as an angel, with big, puffy sleeves; an' the jolliest small boy you ever see. He's a downright little man, though he's only five year old, an' he's curls down to his waist."

"Waal, then, sence they were so friendly, I s'pose you came to some bargain?" said Monongahela.

"Sartain; an' I'm to meet Mr. Stuart to-morrer mornin' at the cross-roads an' show-him a red-bird's nest. He wants to collect eggs an' live specimens."

When, then, the Professor rode up to the appointed rendezvous on the following day, he found Wash awaiting him, "Sally Blazer" in hand, and a powder-horn and shot-pouch slung from his neck by a leather strap. His feet, too, were encased in moccasins that his footfall might not startle the shy creatures of the wildwood.

"Ah, my lad, I see you understand the business," remarked the ornithologist, with an approving nod, "and I predict we shall be fine friends."

Thus, too, it proved and for both. That was the beginning of a month of happy, halcyon days spent in the open; a perpetual picnic, scaling the rough but ever-enchanting hills, wandering through the beautiful solemn pine forests, following Nature's most winsome things to their chosen haunts, and always breathing in the resinous health-giving mountain air. Sometimes, when the tramp was not to be too long a one, small Royal accompanied his father, gay and joyous as a dancing grig, and looking like a little Highland princeling in his outing costume of Scotch plaid, proudly flourishing a tiny wooden gun.

"We are good chums, ain't we, Wash?" he would say, in his precocious friendly little way—"good chums, going hunting together. But we mustn't kill things just for fun. That is naughty. Papa says food or science is the only excuse. He never takes but one egg from a nest, and would rather snare birds than shoot them."

Occasionally, too, pretty Jean would join the party at a given point, driving over with a dainty lunch from the hotel, and then there would be a merry out-door meal in some cozy green nook, near to one of the cold clear mountain