he crystal brook that by some strange whim was called Mud Creek. Her little ones were on

t even a few inches behind, and seeming so fragile they made the very chicadees look big and coarse. There were twelve of them, but Mother Grouse watched them all, and she watched every bush and tree and thicket, and the whole woods and the sky itself. Always for enem

de. One dived under a leaf, another between two roots, a third crawled into a curl of birch-bark, a fourth into a hole, and so on, till all were hidden but one who could find no cover,

he flopped by chance just a foot out of reach. He followed with another jump and would have seized her this time surely, but somehow a sapling came just between, and the partridge dragged herself awkwardly away and under a log, but the great brute snapped his jaws and bounded over the log, while she, seeming a trifle less lame, made another clumsy forward spring and tumbled down a bank, and Reynard, keenly following, almost caught her tail, but, oddly enough, fast as he went and leaped, she still seemed just a trifle faster. It was most extraordinary. A winged partridge and

rcle and came by a roundabout way back to the li

mire the perfect stillness of her children. Even at her step not one had stirred, and the little fellow on the chip, not so very

opened his big-little eyes and ran to the shelter of her broad tail, with a sweet little 'peep peep' which an enemy could not have heard three feet away, but which his mo

reful lookout for enemies, the mother gathered the little things under the shadow of her spread

e carried behind was enough. He was an old friend; and among other things the little one

rest of living water, though si

e thanks after every sip. There they stood in a row along the edge, twelve little brown and golden balls on twenty-four little

slope. The ants swarmed out and quarrelled with each other for lack of a better plan. Some ran around the hill with vast energy and little purpose, while a few of the more sensible began to carry away fat white eggs. But the old partridge, coming to the little ones, picked up one of these juicy-looking bags and clucked and dropped it, and picked it up again and again and clucked, then swallowed it. The young ones stood around, then one little yellow fellow, the one t

and scratched with their tiny feet and flopped with their wings, though they had no wings to flop with, only a little tag among the down on each side, to show where the wings would come. That night she took them to a dry thicket near by, and there among the crisp, dead leaves that would prevent an en