[Illustration:  Track of small mud turtle]

He sketched it, but before the drawing was done it dawned on him that this must be the track of a young Mud-turtle.  He also saw a lot of very familiar tracks, not a few being those of the common Cat, and he wondered why they should be about so much and yet so rarely seen.  Of course the animals were chiefly nocturnal, but the boys were partly so, and always on the ground now, so that explanation was not satisfactory.  He lay down on his breast at the edge of the brook, which had here cut in a channel with steep clay walls six feet high and twenty feet apart.  The stream was very small now—­a mere thread of water zigzagging over the level muddy floor of the “canon,” as Yan loved to call it.  A broad, muddy margin at each side of the water made a fine place of record for the travelling Four-foots, and tracks new and old were there in abundance.

The herbage on the bank was very rank and full of noisy Grasshoppers and Crickets.  Great masses of orange Jewelweed on one side were variegated with some wonderful Cardinal flowers.  Yan viewed all this with placid content.  He knew their names now, and thus they were transferred from the list of tantalizing mysteries to that of engaging and wonderful friends.  As he lay there on his breast his thoughts wandered back to the days when he did not know the names of any flowers or birds—­when all was strange and he alone in his hunger to know them, and Bonnerton came back to him with new, strange force of reminder.  His father and mother, his brother and schoolmates were there.  It seemed like a bygone existence, though only two months ago.  He had written his mother to tell of his arrival, and once since to say that he was well.  He had received a kind letter from his mother, with a scripture text or two, and a postscript from his father with some sound advice and more scripture texts.  Since then he had not written.  He could not comprehend how he could so completely drift away, and yet clearly it was because he had found here in Sanger the well for which he had thirsted.

As he lay there thinking, a slight movement nearer the creek caught his eye.  A large Basswood had been blown down.  Like most of its kind, it was hollow.  Its trunk was buried in the tangle of rank summer growth, but a branch had been broken off and left a hole in the main stem.  In the black cavern of the hole there appeared a head with shining green eyes, then out there glided onto the log a common gray Cat.  She sat there in the sunshine, licked her paws, dressed her fur generally, stretched her claws and legs after the manner of her kind, walked to the end of the log, then down the easy slope to the bottom of the canon.  Here she took a drink, daintily shook the water from her paws, and set the hair just right with a stroke.  Then to Yan’s amusement she examined all the tracks much as he had done, though it seemed clear that her nose, not her eyes, was judge.  She walked down stream, leaving some very fine impressions that Yan mentally resolved to have in his note-book, very soon suddenly stopped, looked upward and around, a living picture of elegance, sleekness and grace, with eyes of green fire then deliberately leaped from the creek bed to the tangle of the bank and disappeared.