safe to go a-wanderin' about there a-doin' of nothin',
I tell _you_. Well, one arternoon, father sends me into
the back pastur', to bring home the cows, 'And,' says
he, 'keep a stirrin', Sam, go ahead right away, and be
out of the bushes afore sun-set, on account of the bears,
for that's about the varmints' supper-time.'

"Well, I looks to the sky, and I sees it was a considerable
of a piece yet to daylight down, so I begins to pick
strawberries as I goes along, and you never see any thing
so thick as they were, and wherever the grass was long,
they'd stand up like a little bush, and hang in clusters,
most as big and twice as good, to my likin', as garden
ones. Well, the sun, it appears to me, is like a hoss,
when it comes near dark it mends its pace, and gets on
like smoke, so afore I know'd where I was, twilight had
come peepin' over the spruce tops.

"Off I sot, hot foot, into the bushes, arter the cows,
and as always eventuates when you are in a hurry, they
was further back than common that time, away ever so fur
back to a brook, clean off to the rear of the farm, so
that day was gone afore I got out of the woods, and I
got proper frightened. Every noise I heerd I thought it
was a bear, and when I looked round a one side, I guessed
I heerd one on the other, and I hardly turned to look
there before, I reckoned it was behind me, I was e'en
a'most skeered to death.

"Thinks I, 'I shall never be able to keep up to the cows