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The situation of the encampment.

CHAPTER IX.

THE LOST BONNET.

THE place which Beechnut had chosen for the encampment of the party was very wild and picturesque, and yet very beautiful. It was upon a sort of plateau, or level area, among the rocks, with tall fir trees and perpendicular cliffs hanging over it, and vast chasms and precipices in front and at the sides. It was approached by a circuitous and winding path somewhat difficult to ascend. This path was really safe, but there was enough of the semblance of danger in its steepness and unguardedness to make the children feel a strong interest in the work of climbing up, and to fill their hearts with an emotion of satisfaction and triumph when they found that they had surmounted the difficulty, and were standing securely on the sublime elevation to which it had conducted them.

The place was shaded in some parts by tall firs and pines, which grew wildly wherever there were cavities in the rocks which were

The old hollow log near the tent.

filled with soil, or clung to the sides or summits of the cliffs by means of long and tenacious roots which they sent down into the seams and crevices. Here and there the trunks of ancient trees which had been overturned in former years by the winds, lay upon the ground, buried and concealed by the rank growth of brakes, ferns, laurels, and raspberry bushes, which had sprung up around them. There was one such log, very old and hollow at one end, which lay pretty near the place where Beechnut had pitched his tent. The open end of it, which was turned toward the tent, formed a mouth, like that of an oven. From this open and hollow end the log extended a long distance among the bushes, with its own broken and decayed branches lying by its side, until at last it was lost in an inextricable maze of old and dry logs, stumps, and tangled branches, which formed a dry, and brown, and withered heap, that contrasted strongly with the fresh green shoots of the birches, firs and pines which were growing up luxuriously in the midst of it.

When the party left their tent and went away to commence the gathering of the blue berries, they supposed that the place which they had chosen for their encampment was so

A strange visitor,-Bunnianne.

wild and secluded that the arrangements which they had made there would remain wholly unseen and unknown until they should return. They had not been gone more than half an hour however before the spot was visited, and the tent discovered, by a strange observer, who was very much alarmed at what she saw. This observer was a large and beautiful mother squirrel. It was a grey squirrel,—the kind which the boys at Franconia most highly admired. Beechnut saw this squirrel the evening before when he came up with the tent. She was standing when he first saw her, on the point of a rock watching Beechnut very anxiously to see whether he would go near to the place where her nest was, which as it had two young ones in it, was of course an object with her, of great maternal solicitude. After Beechnut had put his tent in the cleft where he had intended to hide it until the next day, he still saw the squirrel standing motionless on the rock, and watching him with one of her jet black eyes.

"Ah-I see you, old mother Bunnianne," said Beechnut, "with your cheeks stuffed full of berries for supper for your children. I wonder where you live."

Beechnut's conversation.

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Bunnianne's alarm.

I wish I had that tail of yours," continued Beechnut, "for a plume, to give Phonny, or else one of your little Bunnies ;-—about as long, I suppose they are, as my thumb. I'll give you a quart of walnuts for one of them,-or even almonds, which are sweeter still. What do you say? Almonds are a great deal better than acorns.

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Bunnianne cocked her head round, so as to take a look at Beechnut with her other eye, but said nothing.

Now the observer that discovered the tent after the party had pitched it and gone away, was this very Bunnianne. She was returning to her nest along the branches of the fir trees in the thickest when her attention was arrested by the sight of the tent. She was astonished and greatly alarmed. Her nest was in the hollow trunk which has already been described, about midway of its length, and as the tent was not very far from one end of the log, it was to be expected that a mother, naturally so timid and anxious as she, would be somewhat startled at such an unexpected apparition.

Bunnianne ran out to the end of the branch of the fir-tree upon which she was standing when the tent came first into view, until the

Bunnianne reconoitres the encampment.

What could it

end bent down under her weight so far that she could swing herself from it to the end of a bough belonging to another tree. She ran along this bough a little way, and then stopped and began again to examine the tent. be? Was it some sort of a trap, set to catch her? Or was it possible that it was an enormous mushroom that had suddenly sprung up out of the ground? She looked at it very attentively for a few minutes without being able to come to any satisfactory conclusion, and then began to think of her little ones. She was anxious to know whether they were safe. So she ran along the bough of the fir-tree to the main stem, thence down the main stem half way to the ground, and then leaping four feet through the air to her log, she ran along upon it till she came to a small hole in a crotch near the place where her nest was situated within; and then lowering her tail she crept into the hole, drawing her tail in gently after her. To her great joy she found her young squirrels perfectly safe. In fact, they were all asleep, being perfectly unconscious that any tent had been erected near their dwelling.

Still Bunnianne, though much relieved at finding all safe at her nest, was by no means

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