Partridge came out and joined him. They consulted together with queer little duckings, and finally ran off into the undergrowth as if bent on a frolic.The work of Mr. and Mrs. Partridge was so well done that Joe found it
very difficult to discover the nest when he went out of the office. He
knew where it was from his window, but when he came to look for it out
of doors it seemed to have disappeared, so deftly was it concealed; and
he would have been compelled to hunt for it very carefully but for the
fact that when Mrs. Partridge found herself disturbed she rushed from
the little grass tunnel and threw herself at Joe's feet, fluttering
around as if desperately wounded, and uttering strange little cries of
distress. Once she actually touched his feet with her wings, but when he
stooped to pick her up she managed to flutter off just out of reach
of his hand. Joe followed along after Mrs. Partridge for some little
distance, and he discovered that the farther she led him away from her
nest the more her condition improved, until finally she ran off into the
sedge and disappeared. Joe has never been able to find any one to tell
him how Mrs. Partridge knew what kind of antics a badly wounded bird
would cut up. He has been told that it is the result of instinct. The
scientists say, however, that instinct is the outgrowth of necessity;
but it seems hard to believe that necessity could have given Mrs.
Partridge such accurate knowledge of the movements of a wounded bird.

In carrying proofs from the printing-office to the editor, Joe Maxwell
made two discoveries that he considered very important. One was that
there was a big library of the best books at his command, and the other
was that there was a pack of well-trained harriers on the plantation.
He loved books and he loved dogs, and if he had been asked to choose
between the library and the harriers he would have hesitated a long
time. The books were more numerous--there were nearly two thousand of
them, while there were only five harriers--but in a good many respects
the dogs were the liveliest. Fortunately, Joe was not called on to make
any choice. He had the dogs to himself in the late afternoon and the
books at night, and he made the most of both. More than this, he had
the benefit of the culture of the editor of _The Countryman_ and of the
worldly experience of Mr. Snelson, the printer.

To Joe Maxwell, sadly lacking in knowledge of mankind, Mr. Snelson
seemed to be the most engaging of men. He was the echo and mouthpiece of
a world the youngster had heard of but never seen, and it pleased him

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