We expected a friendly visit from porcupines that night, as we saw where they had freshly gnawed all about us; hence, when a red squirrel came and looked in upon us very early in the morning and awoke us by his snickering and giggling, my comrade cried out, “There is your porcupig.”  How the frisking red rogue seemed to enjoy what he had found!  He looked in at the door and snickered, then in at the window, then peeked down from between the rafters and cachinnated till his sides must have ached; then struck an attitude upon the chimney, and fairly squealed with mirth and ridicule.  In fact, he grew so obstreperous, and so disturbed our repose, that we had to “shoo” him away with one of our boots.  He declared most plainly that he had never before seen so preposterous a figure as we cut lying there in the corner of that old shanty.

The morning boded rain, the week to which we had limited ourselves drew near its close, and we concluded to finish our holiday worthily by a good square tramp to the railroad station, twenty-three miles distant, as it proved.  Two miles brought us to stumpy fields, and to the house of the upper inhabitant.  They told us there was a short cut across the mountain, but my soldier shook his head.

“Better twenty miles of Europe,” said he, getting Tennyson a little mixed, “than one of Cathay, or Slide Mountain either.”

Drops of the much-needed rain began to come down, and I hesitated in front of the woodshed.

“Sprinkling weather always comes to some bad end,” said Aaron, with a reminiscence of an old couplet in his mind, and so it proved, for it did not get beyond a sprinkle, and the sun shone out before noon.

In the next woods I picked up from the middle of the road the tail and one hind leg of one of our native rats, the first I had ever seen except in a museum.  An owl or fox had doubtless left it the night before.  It was evident the fragments had once formed part of a very elegant and slender creature.  The fur that remained (for it was not hair) was tipped with red.  My reader doubtless knows that the common rat is an importation, and that there is a native American rat, usually found much farther south than the locality of which I am writing, that lives in the woods,—­a sylvan rat, very wild and nocturnal in his habits, and seldom seen even by hunters or woodmen.  Its eyes are large and fine, and its form slender.  It looks like only a far-off undegenerate cousin of the filthy creature that has come to us from the long-peopled Old World.  Some creature ran between my feet and the fire toward morning, the last night we slept in the woods, and I have little doubt it was one of these wood-rats.

The people in these back settlements are almost as shy and furtive as the animals.  Even the men look a little scared when you stop them by your questions.  The children dart behind their parents when you look at them.  As we sat on a bridge resting,—­for our packs still weighed fifteen or twenty pounds each,—­two women passed us with pails on their arms, going for blackberries.  They filed by with their eyes down like two abashed nuns.