f the fox.

We resumed our digging, and soon broke into a still larger cavity,
leading off from which were three passages. Fresh earth was flying back
out of one of them.

"We are close hauls on the fox inside!" cried Thomas. "Stand ready with
the gun, Ad; he may make a bolt out by us."

The Old Squire plied the crowbar again, and breaking down a part of the
bank over the passage, we caught sight of three fox cubs, all making the
dirt fly, digging away for dear life, to get farther back. As the bank
broke down and the light fell in upon them, they turned for a moment
from their labors, and casting a foxy eye up at us, "yapped" sharply and
bristled themselves.

"Oh, the little rogues!" cried Addison. "Only look at them! Look at
their little paws and their little noses all covered with yellow dirt!
There they go at it again, digging!"

"Aren't they cunning!" exclaimed Thomas. "Fox all over, too. Regular
little rascals. See the white of those eyes, will you, when they turn
them up at us! Isn't that a rogue's eye now?"

"We will catch them and carry them home, and put them in a pen," said
Addison. "By next November their skins will be worth something."

"They will make you lots of work, to tend them and get meat for them,"
said the Old Squire. "Their pelts will not half pay you for your
trouble."

These cubs were several weeks old, I suppose, but they were not larger
than half-grown kittens.

"It won't answer for you to grab them with your bare hands," the Old
Squire warned us. "I did that once, when a boy, and found that a fox cub
is sharp-bitten."

They were of rather lighter yellow tint than a full-grown fox, but
otherwise much like, although their legs, we thought, were not yet as
long in proportion as they would become; nor yet were their tails in
full bush.

It was not quite as far across lots to the Edwards farm as it was to the
Old Squire's, and at length Addison and Thomas set off to go there for a
basket to put the foxes in, and some old thick gloves with which to
catch them.

Meantime the rest of us remained hard by, to watch the burrow, lest the
cubs should escape. Once, while the boys were gone, we heard the mother
fox bark. Halse went after her with the gun; she was evidently lingering
about, but he could not catch sight of her.

The boys returned with a bushel basket and an old potato sack, to tie
over the top of it. A little more of the bank was then broken down, when
Addison, reaching in w