exception to the rule. I knew all of _Thanatopsis_ and most of _The Ancient Mariner_. When I recited these, Jagg always listened with an air of polite interest. One morning, however, as I built my fire, I chanced to repeat Cowper’s beautiful lines beginning: “O for a lodge in some vast wilderness!” Immediately my attention was attracted by Jagg. He tore about madly, giving every evidence of joy, bleating loudly, and furiously wagging his stub of a tail. He stood on his head, rising at once to the perpendicular, then as swiftly reversed. Something happened then which I could not explain, and I rubbed my eyes in wonder. A moment before he had been there and now he was nowhere in sight. I never learned how he did it, for he moved too rapidly for the eye to follow, but, according to my theory, he put his four feet together and with a single powerful muscular effort shot himself into space, alighting perhaps a quarter of a mile distant, and returning when he pleased. This gave him his sub-title in my records: “The Skootaway Goat.”

At first I was overjoyed to have the faithful animal with me, but, by insensible degrees, his companionship began to pall. He went with me once to the Porcupine race, but speedily made both of us unpopular. Again, I locked him into the cabin, but no sooner had I returned than I regretted it. He ate one of my note-books and thereby many priceless observations are lost to the world.

I bought a rope and tied him to a tree, but he joined me at Porcupine Hill with evident satisfaction at the reunion. I got a long chain from the village and this foiled him only once. He filed it apart with tooth and horn and acquired so insatiable an appetite for cold metal that he even hunted my pockets at night for coins. Canned goods were eaten, tin and all, as soon as I brought them home. I began to perceive, dimly, that I must part with Jagg, and ultimately regarded the notion as a relief measure passed by an overwhelming majority.

Yet ways and means were lacking, and also, possibly, the initiative. He had grown into a very handsome animal by this time, and I was so accustomed to him that the woods had an unfriendly, alien smell when I fared forth alone. I had given up the thought of tying him, and he usually went with me, quite as a matter of course.

At the post-office one morning, I received a letter from my lawyers, stating that I had fallen heir to another ancestral estate about one hundred miles south of my present habitation. My grandfather on my mother’s side had just been reaped, and this testimonial of his affection was left to me. I folded the letter idly and 

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