hazy
twilight, that, earlier in the year, shimmered like a wonderful
afterglow on the mossy pasture-floor. Now their only desire was for
food and sleep.

Unnoticed by a passing owl, Kweek, worn to a skeleton by sickness and
privation, crawled from his burrow into the moonlight of a calm, clear
autumn night, and lay in the shadow of the stone where the old male vole
had watched and listened for the cruel "vear." A big blow-fly,
attracted, with countless thousands of his kind, to the place of
slaughter and decay, had gone to sleep on the side of the stone, and
Kweek, in a last desperate effort to obtain a little food, moved forward
to secure his prize; but at that moment his strength failed him, his
weary limbs relaxed, and the dull, grey film of death overspread his
half-closed eyes.

The owl, hearing a faint sound like the rustle of a dry grass-bent,
quickly turned in her flight; then, slanting her wings, dropped to the
ground, and presently, with her defenceless quarry in her talons, flew
away towards the woods.

THE FOX.

I.

THE LAST HUNT.

A dark and wind-swept night had fallen over the countryside when Reynard
left the steep slope above the keeper's cottage, and stole through gorse
and brambles towards the outskirts of the covert, where a narrow dingle,
intersected by a noisy rill and thickly matted with brown bracken,
divided the furze from some neighbouring pine-woods.

For months nothing had occurred to disturb the peace of his woodland
home. Once, about a year ago, he had fled for his life before the
hounds; and again, during the last autumn, while lying hidden in the
ditch of the root-crop field above the pines, he had been surprised by
two sheep-dogs that nipped him sorely before he could make good his
escape. But at no other time had he been in evident peril, and so,
though naturally cunning and suspicious, he had grown bolder, and better
acquainted with the neighbourhood of cottage and farmstead than were
certain members of his family living on the opposite side of the valley,
among thickets hunted regularly, where guns and spaniels might be heard
from early morning till close of day.

Here and there, as the fox crept stealthily among the blackthorns and
the gorse-bushes, he stopped for a moment on the scent of a rabbit; but
the night was not such as to induce Bunny to remain outside her cosy
burrow in the bank. He examined each "creep" in the tangled clumps along
his way, and sometimes