“I’ll never be able to eat one, never!” she confided to me.  “Did you see its eyes?  Lizzie, do you remember Mr. Wiggins’s eyes? and the way he used to move his nose, just like that?”

At the end of fifteen miles the driver drew up his horses and took a fresh chew of tobacco.

“I guess this is about right,” he said.  “That trail there’ll take you to the lake.  How long do you reckon it’ll be before you’ll need some fresh eggs?”

“We are quite able to look after ourselves,” said Tish with hauteur, and got out of the wagon.  She paid him off at once and sat down on her suitcase until he had driven out of sight.  He drove slowly, looking back every now and then, and his last view of us must have been impressive—­three middle-aged and determined women ready to conquer the wilderness, as Tish put it, and two suitcases.

It was as solitary a place as we could have wished.  We had not seen a house in ten miles, and when the last creak of the wagon had died away there was a silence that made our city-broke ears fairly ache.  Tish waited until the wagon was out of sight; then she stood up and threw out her arms.

“At last!” she said.  “Free to have a lodge in some vast wilderness—­to think, to breathe, to expand!  Lizzie, do you suppose if we go back we can get that rabbit?”

I looked at my watch.  It was one o’clock and there was not a berry-bush in sight.  The drive had made me hungry, and I’d have eaten a rabbit that looked like Mr. Wiggins and called me by name if I’d had it.  But there was absolutely no use going back for the one we’d seen on our drive.

Aggie was opening her suitcase and getting out her costume, which was a blue calico with short sleeves and a shoe-top skirt.

“Where’ll I put it on?” she asked, looking about her.

“Right here!” Tish replied.  “For goodness sake, Aggie, try to discard false modesty and false shame.  We’re here to get close to the great beating heart of Nature.  Take off your switch before you do another thing.”

None of us looked particularly well, I admit; but it was wonderful how much more comfortable we were.  Aggie, who is very thin, discarded a part of her figure, and each of us parted with some pet hypocrisy.  But I don’t know that I have ever felt better.  Only, of course we were hungry.

We packed our things in the suitcases and hid them in a hollow tree, and Tish suggested looking for a spring.  She said water was always the first requisite and fire the second.

“Fire!” said Aggie.  “What for?  We’ve nothing to cook.”

Well, that was true enough, so we sent Aggie to look for water and Tish and I made a rabbit snare.  We made a good many snares and got to be rather quick at it.  They were all made like this illustration.

[Illustration]

First Tish, with her book open in front of her, made a running noose out of one of the buckskin thongs.  Next we bent down a sapling and tied the noose to it, and last of all we bound the free part of the thong round a snag and thus held the sapling down.  The idea is that a rabbit, bounding along, presumably with his eyes shut, will stick his head through the noose, kick the line clear of the snag and be drawn violently into the air.  Tish figured that by putting up half a dozen snares we’d have three or four rabbits at least each day.