feel easy with sech a mischeevious scamp around."

Byers made no rejoinder, and the tanner, puffing his pipe, vaguely
watched the wreaths of smoke rise above his head, and whisk
buoyantly about in the air, and finally skurry off into
invisibility. A gentle breeze was astir in the woods, and it set
the leaves to whispering. The treetoads and the locusts were
trolling a chorus. So loudly vibrant, it was! So clamorously gay!
Some subtle intimation they surely had that summer was ephemeral and
the season waning, for the burden of their song was, Let us now be
merry. The scarlet head of a woodpecker showed brilliantly from the
bare dead boughs of a chestnut-oak, which, with its clinging lichens
of green and gray, was boldly projected against the azure sky. And
there, the filmy moon, most dimly visible in the afternoon sunshine,
swung like some lunar hallucination among the cirrus clouds.

"Ye 'lows ez I ain't doin' right by Birt?" the tanner suggested
presently, with more conscience in the matter than one would have
given him credit for possessing.

"I knows ye air doin' right," said Byers unexpectedly.

All at once the woodpecker was solemnly tapping--tapping.

Byers glanced up, as if to discern whence the sudden sound came, and
once more bent to his work.

"Ye b'lieves, then, ez he stole that thar grant from Nate Griggs?"
asked Perkins.