x wasn't quite dead after all, it was only shamming dead. At any
rate it got Giles' hand in its mouth and made its teeth meet through the
flesh.

Now the keeper began to jump about just as the fox had done when it
set its paw in the trap, shouting and saying all sorts of things that
somehow I don't think I ought to repeat here. Round and round he
went with the fox hanging to his hand, like hares do when they dance
together, for he couldn't get it off anyhow. At last he tumbled down
into a pool of mud and water, and when he got up again all wet through I
saw that the fox was really dead. But it had died biting, and now I know
that this pleased it very much.

It was just then that the man whom the keeper had called Grampus came
up. He was a big, fat man with a very red face, who made a kind of
blowing noise when he walked fast. I know now that he was the lord of
all the other men about that place, that he lived in the house which
looked over the sea, and that the boy and girl who put me in with the
yellow-toothed rabbit were his children. He was what the farmers called
"a first-rate all-round sportsman," which means, my friend--but what is
your name?

"Oh! Mahatma," I answered at hazard.

"Which means, my friend Mahatma, that he spent most of the year in
killing the lower animals such as me. Yes, he spent quite eight months
out of the twelve in killing us one way and another, for when there was
no more killing to be done in his own country, he would travel to others
and kill there. He would even kill pigeons from a trap, or young rooks
just out of their nests, or rats in a stack, or sparrows among
ivy, rather than not kill anything. I've heard Giles say so to the
under-keeper and call him 'a regular slaughterer' and 'a true-blood
Englishman.'

"Yet, my friend Mahatma, I say in the light of the truth which has come
to me, that according to his knowledge Grampus was a good man. Thus,
what little time he had to spare from sport he passed in helping his
brother men by sending them to prison. Although of course he never
worked or earned anything, he was very rich, because money flowed to him
from other people who had been very rich, but who at last were forced
to travel this Road and could not bring it with them. If they could have
brought it, I am sure that Grampus would never have got any. However, he
did get it, and he aided a great many people with that part of it which
he found he could not spend upon himself. He wa