As I sat at my table, writing in my journal, I heard a low, mournful sound from the shelf and then the words, tapped out in the Morse code: “Forgive me; I had to do it.”

I foolishly paid no attention, but went on writing down the noble ideas that surged hotly through my brain. Later on—I shall never know how much later—I heard the dull sound of a falling body, and the pungent odour of cyanide of potassium filled the room. The bottle of it which I kept on the shelf to attract butterflies had been opened and drained to the dregs.

Close by it, with the glaze of death over his bright eyes, lay Upsidaisi. Heart-broken by my coldness, the little Mouse had committed suicide.

Little feet, little feet, shall I see your delicate tracery no more around the door of my cabin in the wilderness? The end of a wild animal is always a tragedy.

JAGG, THE SKOOTAWAY GOAT 

After the tragical deaths of Tom-Tom and Upsidaisi, my life was strangely lonely. No one who has not experienced it can realize the subtle, almost spiritual attachment which may exist between man and his kindred of the wild. The Squirrels barked at each other, but there was no bark for me except on the oak tree at my cabin door. The little Birds sang, but not for me. Whenever I approached a thicket where the woodland chorus was in rehearsal, trying to learn the Bird-calls which are printed in the books, there was a spontaneous silence which seemed to possess a positive rather than a negative quality.

I felt like a marked man. In my fevered fancy I could hear the wood creatures saying to one another: “There goes the man who lived with Little Upsidaisi. By the way, have you seen Upsidaisi lately? What a brute the man looks, to be sure! Come, let us skip, while we have the time.”

So it was that I seemed to be the center of an ever-widening circle of departure. Feet pattered away from me in a continual diminuendo, dying at last into that mournful, unchanging silence which encompassed me like a blanket of gloom.

It is not my intention to depress the reader, but the scientific observer must make accurate records, and my mental state at the time may have been partially responsible for what followed.

Regularly, I took my walk of fourteen miles into town. At first I had contented myself with weekly visits to the post-office, but as the returned manuscripts augmented, I went every 

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