doctor who cared to save my body so long as he could eat my pears--with
others interested severally in my asparagus, my rhubarb, my lilies, and
sweet-peas. Always not forgetting a few inestimably wholesome, cheery,
noble souls, who sought me out on the edge of human life rather than
succeeded in drawing me over the edge towards the centre.

But this Georgiana has been doing--long without my knowing it. I have
become less a woodsman, more a civilian. Unless she relents, it may
end in my ceasing to be a lover of birds, and running for the
Legislature. Seeing me so much on the streets, one of my
fellow-townsmen declared the other day that if I would consent to come
out of the canebrakes for good they would make me postmaster.

It has fallen awkwardly for me that this enforced transformation in my
tastes and habits should coincide with the season of my love-making;
and it is well that Georgiana does not demand in me the capering or
strutting manners of those young men of my day who likewise are
exerting themselves to marry. I am more like a badger than like one of
them; and indeed I find the image of my fate and my condition in a
badger-like creature close at hand.

For the carpenter who is at work upon bridal repairs in my house has
the fancy not uncommon among a class hereabouts to keep a tamed
raccoon. He brings it with him daily, and fastens it by its chain to a
tree in my front yard: a rough, burly, knowing fellow, loving wild
nature, but forced to acquire the tediousness of civilization; meantime
leading a desperately hampered life; wondering at his own teeth and
claws, and sorely put to it to invent a decent occupation. So am I;
and as the raccoon paces everywhere after the carpenter, so do I in
spirit pace everywhere after Georgiana; only his chain seems longer and