me their eyes glared, and they howled with fury. The thought flashed on my mind that by this means I could avoid them, namely, by turning aside whenever they came too near; for, by the formation of their feet, they are unable to run on ice except in a straight line.

10. I immediately acted upon this plan. The wolves, having regained their feet, sprang directly toward me. The race was renewed for many yards up the stream; they were almost close on my back, when I glided round and dashed directly past them. A fierce yell greeted this evolution; and the wolves, slipping on their haunches, again slid onward, presenting a perfect picture of helplessness and baffled rage. Thus I gained nearly a hundred yards at each turning. This was repeated two or three times, every moment the baffled animals becoming more and more excited.

11. Once, by delaying my turning too long, my sanguinary antagonists came so near that they threw their white foam over my dress as they sprang to seize me, and their teeth clashed together like the spring of a fox-trap. Had my skates failed for one instant, had I tripped on a stick, or had my foot been caught in a fissure, the story I am now telling would never have been told. I thought all the chances over. I thought how long it would be before I died, and then of the search for my body. How fast man's mind traces out all the dread colors of death's picture, only those who have been near the grim original can tell.

But I soon came opposite the house, and my hounds (I knew their deep voices), roused by the noise, bayed furiously from their kennels. I heard their chains rattle. How I wished they would break them! Then I should

have had protectors to match the fiercest denizens of the forest

12. The wolves, taking the hint conveyed by the dogs, stopped in their iad career, and, after a few moments, turned and fled. I watched them until their forms disappeared over a neighboring hill; then, taking off my skates, I wended my way to the house with feelings which may be better imagined than described. But even yet, I never see a broad sheet of ice by moonlight without thinking of that snuffing breath, and those ferocious beasts that followed me so closely down that frozen river.

1. THE coyote of the farther deserts is a long, slim, sick, and sorry-looking skeleton, with a gray wolf-skin stretched over it, a tolerably bushy tail that forever hangs down with a despairing expression of forsakenness and misery, a furtive and evil eye, and a long, sharp face, with slightly lifted lip and exposed teeth.

2. He has a general slinking expression all over. The coyote is a living, breathing allegory of want. He is always hungry; he is always poor, out of luck, and friendless. The meanest creatures despise him. He is so spiritless and cowardly that, even while his exposed teeth are pretending a threat, the rest of his face is apologizing for it. And he is so homely so scrawny, and ribby, and coarsehaired, and pitiful!

3. When he sees you he lifts his lip and lets a flash of his teeth out, and then turns a little out of the course he was pursuing, depresses his head a bit, and strikes a long, soft-footed trot through the sage-brush, glancing over his shoulder at you from time to time till he is about out of easy pistol-range, and then he stops and takes a deliberate survey of you. He will trot fifty yards, and stop again; another fifty, and stop again; and, finally, the gray of his gliding body blends with the gray of the sage-brush, and he disappears.

4. But if you start a swift-footed dog after him you will enjoy it ever so much, especially if it is a dog that has a good opinion of himself, and has been brought up to think that he knows something about speed. The coyote will go swinging gently off on that deceitful trot of his, and every little while he will smile a fraudful smile over his shoulder that will fill that dog entirely full of encouragement and worldly ambition, and make him lay his head still lower to the ground, and stretch his neck farther to the front, and pant more fiercely, and move his furious legs with a yet wilder frenzy, and leave a broader and broader and higher and denser cloud of desert sand smoking behind, and marking his long wake across the level plain.

5. All this time the dog is only a short twenty feet behind the coyote, and, to save the life of him, he cannot understand why it is that he cannot get perceptibly closer; and he begins to get aggravated, and it makes him madder and madder to see how gently the coyote glides along, and never pants or sweats or ceases to smile; and he grows still more and more incensed to see how shamefully he has been taken in by an entire stranger, and what an ignoble swindle that long, calm, soft-footed trot is.

6. And next the dog notices that he is getting fagged, and that the coyote actually has to slacken speed a little to keep from running away from him. And then that town-dog is mad in earnest, and he begins to strain, and weep, and swear, and paw the sand higher than ever, and reach for the coyote with concentrated and desperate

energy.

7. This spurt finds him six feet behind the gliding enemy, and two miles from his friends. And then, in the instant that wild new hope is lighting up his face, the coyote turns

and smiles blandly upon him once more, and with a something about it which seems to say: "Well, I shall have to tear myself away from you, but, business is business, and it will not do for me to be fooling along this way all day." And forthwith there is a rushing sound, and the sudden splitting of a long crack through the atmosphere, and behold, that dog is solitary and alone in the midst of a vast solitude!

1. WHAT reader of Æsop's Fables, can permit the word "fox" to pass through his mind without a smile? Every one has read Æsop, and every one appreciates the humor of the daring rascal who cheats the crow out of her beautiful piece of cheese by the most barefaced flattery, and who, when he had accidentally lost his tail in a trap from which he had hardly escaped with life, with the most unparalleled impudence assembled his friends, and representing the common habit of wearing tails to be plebeian in the ex