While the camp-fire was smoking, for the wood was green and I was willing that my companion should worry over it, I strolled up the long, sandy beach with no particular object in mind and quite ready to meet and parley with any creature that I overtook. I saw only evidences of what had been there, or what I supposed had been. There were tracks that I took to be those of herons, and others that suggested a raccoon in search of crayfish. Here and there a mouse had hurried by. What lively times had been kept up at low tide within sight of the tent door! and yet we knew nothing of it. But these tracks were not well defined, and therefore why not misinterpreted? I have not suggested all the possibilities of the case—— Here my meditations were checked by the call to breakfast, but I took up the subject again as I It occurred to me that when we read of hunters, or perhaps have followed a trapper in his rounds, we have been led to think that footprints are animal autography that the initiated can read without hesitation. To distinguish the track of a rabbit from that of a raccoon is readily done, and we can go much further, and determine whether the animal was walking or running, made a leap here or squatted there; but can we go to any length, and decipher every impress an animal may have made in passing over the sand or mud? I think not. I have seen a twig sent spinning a long distance up the beach at low tide, making a line of equidistant marks that were extremely life-like in appearance. A cloud of dead leaves have so dotted an expanse of mud that a gunner insisted there had been a flock of plover there a few moments before he arrived. All depends, or very much does, on the condition of the surface marked. If very soft and yielding, the plainest bird-tracks may be distorted, and a mere dot, on the other hand, may have its outline so broken as to appear as though made Opportunity afforded while in camp, and I made a short study of footprints. With a field-glass I noted many birds, and then going to the spot, examined the impressions their feet had made. A night-heron did not come down flatly upon its feet with outspread toes, and so the tracks were quite different from the impressions made when the bird walked. Crows, I noticed, both hopped and walked, and the marks were very different, the former being broad and ill-defined in comparison with the traces of the same bird’s stately tread. Had the bird not been seen, any one would have supposed two creatures had been keeping close company, or that some one individual had passed by in the very path of another. The purple grakle and red-winged blackbird made tracks too much alike to be distinguished, yet these Difficult as fossil footprints may be to decipher, they call up with wonderful distinctness the long ago of other geologic ages. It is hard to realize that the stone of which our houses are built once formed the tide-washed shore of a primeval river or the bed of a lake or ocean gone long before man came upon the scene. But the footprints of to-day concern me more. Looking over the side of the boat, I saw several mussels moving slowly along and making a deep, crooked groove in the ripple-marked sand, “streaking the ground with sinuous trace,” as Milton puts it; and the school of blunt-headed minnows made little Towards evening I had occasion to renew my youth,—in other words, “run on an errand,” as my mother put it,—and going half “Through the woodses, eh? Well, when I made the path, goin’ and comin’ through the brush that wasn’t shoulder-high, there was no trees then. That was more’n forty years ago.” "No, John, ’twa’n’t," piped a weak voice from the interior of the little cottage; “’twa’n’t mor’n——” "Laws, man, don’t mind her. She disputes the almanac, and every winter gets in New Year’s ahead of Christmas." I did not stop to argue the matter, but hurried campward, glad that, if I could find Think how much might be done to beautify the world, and how little is accomplished. CHAPTER SIXTEENTH |