IN THE WOODS.

THE FOX-SKIN COAT.

BY ROSE TERRY COOKE.

"It's a dark night, Jenny," said Dr. Putnam to his wife, as he tied on a pair of coarse socks over his boots.

"Dark and cold too, David," said Mrs. Putnam.

"Don't fret, little woman. I've been out in many a worse. I only spoke of it because I doubted whether or no I should take the lantern; but I think I will, since it won't be lighter before I come back."

"Sam!" called Mrs. Putnam, and a curly dark head was thrust in at the door, "fetch father the lantern; light it first."

The Putnam children were trained to prompt obedience. Sam was almost sixteen, but he made neither delay nor objection. When he brought in the old-fashioned tin lantern you saw that he was a tall boy, with an earnest, pleasant face. He followed his father out of the door, hung the lantern by the side of the wagon seat, and tucked in the worn and ragged buffalo-robe as carefully as possible. His father nodded and smiled as he drove off. Sam stopped a moment to inspect the weather: the air was bitter enough, and not a star to be seen.

"Father'll have an awful cold ride," he said, as he re-entered the house; "the wind's northeast, right in his face, and everything is frozen up hard and fast."

"Poor father! he has a hard time winters," sighed Mrs. Putnam.

And indeed he did. A country doctor's life is hard enough; day and night he must drive, in all weather and all seasons; nor does there come to him a time of rest and vacation, for people are always ill somewhere. Dr. Putnam had even a harder time than many others, for the district where he lived was among the hills and forests of upper New Hampshire, where roads were rough, winters bitter, inhabitants few, and doctors scarce. But he had a wife and three children to support, and he could not help himself. Besides, he was a hardy, brave, kindly man, and no night was too stormy, no road too long, if sickness called him. He had always been well till the year before, when an attack of pleurisy took hold of him sharply, and warned him that flesh and blood can not endure more than a given amount of exposure.

All this went through Sam's curly head as he mended the fire in the stove, brought in wood, and then went over to the next neighbor's after Mary Ann, his sister, two years younger than he, who had gone out to take tea. Teddy, the baby of the family, was asleep long ago. Mrs. Putnam still sat by the fire knitting when the children came back, rosy, cold, and laughing.

"Oh, mother, it's awfully cold," said the girl. "I'm so sorry father's gone 'way out to Accomac!"

"Mother," said Sam, "Joe Allen says when he was down to Haverhill last year he saw a man driving stage who had a big coat on all made of fox-skins: wouldn't that be perfectly splendid for father?"

"Yes, indeed, Sam. My father had one; he gave it to Uncle John when he got command of that whaler I've told you about, the Emmeline."

"I wish he hadn't," said Sam. "It's down at the bottom of the sea now; and if you'd had it, just think how warm father might have been!"

"No 'ifs,' Sam; you know we don't allow that little word here."

Sam laughed, and went after his old tin pail of butternuts, and the hammer and stone; but while he cracked them he was thinking very hard indeed, and inside his curly head a plan blossomed which in due time fruited. The little village of Ponds, on whose edge Dr. Putnam's homestead and small farm stood, was nestled in the very heart of the New Hampshire hills. Five miles off a railway ran from the mountains to the sea-board, and there was a station nominally belonging to the town of Sabatis, which lay at least a mile and a half beyond. Ponds, however, was so shut in by the hills that nobody would have suspected a railway near it, except when the south wind brought a shriek of the whistle now and then. North of it lay higher hills, and real mountains miles away, while long stretches of wild forest harbored bears, foxes, even now and then a wild-cat, sometimes a deer, and plenty of smaller game.

Sam had been learning to shoot this summer that was