respectability.  He heard of my sickness, and on Wednesday morning called to see me, proffering his services as a nurse and watchman, prompted by gratitude for the past.  I declined his kindness for the present, as I told him casually of the dog whose midnight barking was killing me.  He called again on Thursday morning.  The barking had ceased.  He inquired if I had been troubled with the yelping of that senseless cur, and I answered truly that I had not, that I had slept soundly, and woke with a softened pulse and a cooled brain.

“‘Well,’ said he, ’I thought you would rest easier.  I looked into the yard as I came along, and saw a dead dog lying there.  I thought may be he had barked himself to death.’

“I did not at the time take in the full meaning, the hidden import of his words.  I dropped away into slumber, and dreamed of the dog that barked himself to death.  I saw him vanish by piecemeal at each successive bark, until nothing but his jaws were left, and as his last bark was uttered, these, too, vanished away, and then all was still.

“I awoke, and thought that a dose of ‘dog-buttons,’ or a taste of strychnine, administered with a tempting bit of cold steak, or a piece of fresh lamb, or a bone of mutton carefully dropped in his way, might have aided the operation.  Be that as it may, whatever of debt may have existed between my young friend and myself for past kind it is all wiped out by the news he brought me, that a ’dead dog lay in the yard over the way.’”

CHAPTER VIII.

STONY BROOK—­A GOOD TIME WITH THE TROUT—­RACKETT RIVER—­TUPPER’S LAKE—­A QUESTION ASKED AND ANSWERED.

The next morning we started down Stony Brook, towards the Rackett River, intending to pitch our tents at night on the banks of Tupper’s Lake, twenty-three miles distant.  Before leaving the Spectacle Ponds, we visited a little island at the north end of the middle pond, containing perhaps half an acre.  This island has a few Norway pines upon it, is of a loose sandy soil, and at the highest portion is some twenty feet above the level of the water.  It is a great resort for turtle in the season of depositing their eggs.  We found thousands of their eggs, some on the surface and some buried in the sand, and if one in a dozen of them brings forth a turtle, there will be no lack of the animal in the neighborhood.  Stony Brook is a sluggish, tortuous stream, large enough to float our little boats, and goes meandering most of the way for five miles among natural meadows, overflowed at high water, or thinly timbered prairie, when it enters the Rackett.  I discovered on a former visit to this wilderness, when the water was very low, a spring that came boiling up near the centre of the stream, with a volume large enough almost to carry a mill.  It was at a point where a high sandy bluff, along which the stream swept, terminated.  As we approached this spot, I suggested to Spalding,