“Oh, I can see now, mamma, I can see all right!”
And the mother deer, to tell the truth, had to go and hide her head in a clump of bushes to conceal the tears of joy that came to her eyes when she saw her little one cured at last. In two weeks, the glasses were laid aside.
As time wore on, the fawn, though happy to be quite herself again, began to grow sad. She was anxious to repay the hunter for his kindness to her; and she could think of no possible way of doing it.
One day, however, an idea occurred to her. As she was trotting along the shore of a pond she came upon a feather which a blue heron had let fall there. “I wonder if that good man would like it?” she thought. And she picked it up.
Then, one night when it was raining hard and the dogs would probably be under cover, she started out for the hunter’s cottage.
The man was reading in his bedroom, feeling quite cozy besides, for he had just completed a thatched roof for his cabin when the rain began. Now he was quite safe and dry out of reach of the storm.
“Tan! Tan! Tan!”
When he opened the door, the little deer, whom he had treated and of whom he had often thought since then, was standing there in the rain, with the heron’s plume, all wet and drooping, in her mouth.
“Here is something I have brought for you,” the fawn explained.
But the hunter began to laugh.