and feed the horses while they prepared
breakfast. At six the meal was over and Corney went to his work. At
noon, which Margat knew by the shadow of a certain rampike falling on
the spring, a clear notification to draw fresh water for the table, Loo
would hang a white rag on a pole, and Corney, seeing the signal, would
return from summer fallow or hayfield, grimy, swarthy, and ruddy, a
picture of manly vigor and honest toil. Thor might be away all day, but
at night, when they again assembled at the table, he would come from
lake or distant ridge and eat a supper like the dinner and breakfast,
for meals as well as days were exact repeats: pork, bread, potatoes,
and tea, with occasionally eggs supplied by a dozen hens around the
little log stable, with, rarely, a variation of wild meat, for Thor was
not a hunter and Corney had little time for anything but the farm.

II

THE LYNX

A huge four-foot basswood had gone the way of all trees. Death had been
generous--had sent the three warnings: it was the biggest of its kind,
its children were grown up, it was hollow. The wintry blast that sent
it down had broken it across and revealed a great hole where should
have been its heart. A long wooden cavern in the middle of a sunny
opening, it now lay, and presented an ideal home for a Lynx when she
sought a sheltered nesting-place for her coming brood.

Old was she and gaunt, for this was a year of hard times for the
Lynxes. A Rabbit plague the autumn before had swept away their main
support; a winter of deep snow and sudden crusts had killed off nearly
all the Partridges; a long wet spring had destroyed the few growing
coveys and had kept the ponds and streams so full that Fish and Frogs
were safe from their armed paws, and this mother Lynx fared no better
than her kind.

The little ones--half starved before they came--were a double drain,
for they took the time she might have spent in hunting.

The Northern Hare is the favorite food of the Lynx, and in some years
she could have killed fifty in one day, but never one did she see this
season. The plague had done its work too well.

One day she caught a Red-squirrel which had run into a hollow log that
proved a trap. Another day a fetid Blacksnake was her only food. A day
was missed, and the little ones whined piteously for their natural food
and failing drink. One day she saw a large black animal of unpleasant
but familiar smell. Swiftly and silently she sprang to make at