with, and that's with these
English folks that dress themselves up, and take fine horses and packs
of dogs, and tear over the country after one little fox or rabbit. Bah,
it's contemptible. Now if they were hunting cruel, man-eating tigers or
animals that destroy property, it would be different thing."

CHAPTER XXIV THE RABBIT AND THE HEN

"YOU had foxes up in Maine, I suppose Mr. Wood, hadn't you?" asked Mr.
Maxwell.

"Heaps of them. I always want to laugh when I think of our foxes, for
they were so cute. Never a fox did I catch in a trap, though I'd set
many a one. I'd take the carcass of some creature that had died, a
sheep, for instance, and put it in a field near the woods, and the foxes
would come and eat it. After they got accustomed to come and eat and
no harm befell them, they would be unsuspecting. So just before a
snowstorm, I'd take a trap and put it this spot. I'd handle it with
gloves, and I'd smoke it, and rub fir boughs on it to take away the
human smell, and then the snow would come and cover it up, and yet those
foxes would know it was a trap and walk all around it. It's a wonderful
thing, that sense of smell in animals, if it is a sense of smell. Joe
here has got a good bit of it."

"What kind of traps were they, father?" asked Mr. Harry.

"Cruel ones steel ones. They'd catch an animal by the leg and sometimes
break the bone. The leg would bleed, and below the jaws of the trap it
would freeze, there being no circulation of the blood. Those steel traps
are an abomination. The people around here use one made on the same
principle for catching rats. I wouldn't have them on my place for any
money. I believe we've got to give an account for all the unnecessary
suffering we put on animals."

"You'll have some to answer for, John, according to your own story,"
said Mrs. Wood.

"I have suffered already," he said. "Many a night I've lain on my bed
and groaned, when I thought of needless cruelties I'd put upon animals
when I was a young, unthinking boy and I was pretty carefully brought
up, too, according to our light in those days. I often think that if I
was cruel, with all the instruction I had to be merciful, what can be
expected of the children that get no good teaching at all when they're
young."

"Tell us some more about the foxes, Mr. Wood," said Mr. Maxwell.

"Well, we used to have rare sport hunting them with fox-hounds. I'd
often go off for the day with my hounds. Sometimes in the earl