about forty rod this side of Hank Simons’ sugar maples, flat onto his stummick an’ disgusted an’ put out awful.  It wuz about all I could do ter git him hum.  I knowed the minute I come in fust time an’ see he warn’t here thet his feelin’s wuz hurt ’cause I left him.  I presaume mebbe I oughter hollered ag’in afore I got so fer off.  Then I thought, of course, he knowed I’d gone to Bog-eddy.  Beats all, what sense some dogs hez.”

I never knew Jonathan to lose patience with George but once:  that was when the dog tried to burrow into the hole of a pair of chipmunks whom Jonathan loved.  They lived in a tree blanketed with moss and lying across the wood road.  George had tried to scrape an acquaintance by crawling in uninvited, nearly scaring the little fellows to death, and Jonathan had flattened him into the dry leaves with his big, paddle-like hands.  That was before the bear-trap had nipped his tail, but George never forgot it.

He was particularly polite to chipmunks after that.  He would lie still by the hour and hear Jonathan talk to them without even a whine of discontent.  I watched the old man one morning up beneath the ledges, groping, on his hands and knees, filling his pockets with nuts, and when he reached the wood road, emptying them in a pile near the chipmunk’s tree, George looking on good-naturedly.

“Guess you leetle cunnin’s better hurry up,” he said, while he poured out the nuts on the ground, his knees sticking up as he sat, like some huge grasshopper’s.  “Guess ye ain’t got more ’n time to fill yer cubbud,—­winter’s a-comin’!  Them leetle birches on Bog-eddy is turnin’ yeller,—­that’s the fust sign.  ‘Fore ye knows it snow’ll be flyin’.  Then whar’ll ye be with everything froze tighter’n Sampson bound the heathen, you cunnin’ leetle skitterin’ pups.  Then I presaume likely ye’ll come a-drulin’ raound an’ want me an’ George should gin ye suthin to git through th’ winter on,—­won’t they, George?”

“Beats all,” he said to me that night, “how thoughtful some dogs is.  Hadn’t been fer George to-day, I’d clean forgot them leetle folks.  I see him scratching raound in the leaves an’ I knowed right away what he wuz thinkin’ of.”

Often when I was sketching in the dense forest, Jonathan would lie down beside me, the old flop of a hat under his head, his talk rambling on.

“I don’t wonder ye like to paint ’em.  Thar hain’t nothin’ so human as trees.  Take thet big hemlock right in front er yer.  Hain’t he led a pretty decent life?  See how praoud an’ tall he’s growed, with them arms of his’n straight aout an’ them leetle chillen of his’n spraouting up raound him.  I tell ye them hemlocks is pretty decent people.  Now take a look at them two white birches down by thet big rock.  Ain’t it a shame the way them fellers hez been goin’ on sence they wuz leetle saplin’s, makin’ it so nothin’ could grow raound ’em,—­with their jackets all ragged an’ tore like tramps, an’ their toes all out of their shoes whar ther roots is stickin’ clear of the bark,—­ain’t they a-ketchin’ it in their ole age?  An’ then foller on daown whar thet leetle bunch er silver maples is dancin’ in the sunlight, so slender an’ cunnin’,—­all aout in their summer dresses, julluk a bevy er young gals,—­ain’t they human like?  I tell ye, trees is the humanest things thet is.”