d them. But patience and knowledge and love, and
a wild, primitive instinct that making shoes had never taken out of his
primitive nature, helped him largely in his hunt. He took them, nursed
them back to strength on a bottle, fed them milk and rice until they
could forage for themselves, turned them loose in the woods, and then,
that fall, he shot them one after the other as often as he had a
holiday from the shop, or a moonlight night upon which he could hunt.

But he did not kill all of them. Seven foxes were shot at my lower
bars last winter. It is now strawberry time again, and again an old
she-fox lies in wait for every hen that flies over the chicken-yard
fence--which means another litter of young foxes somewhere here in the
ridges. The line continues, even at the hands of the man with the gun.
For strangely coupled with the desire to kill is the instinct to save,
in human nature and in all nature--to preserve a remnant, that no line
perish forever from the earth. As the unthinkable ages of geology come
and go, animal and vegetable forms arise, change, and disappear; but
life persists, lines lead on, and in some form many of the ancient
families breathe our air and still find a home on this small and
smaller-growing globe of ours.

And it may continue so for ages yet, with our help and permission.

Wild life is changing more rapidly to-day than ever before, is being
swept faster and faster toward the brink of the world; but it is
cheering to look out of my window, as I write, and see the brown
thrasher getting food for her young out of the lawn, to hear the
scratch of squirrels' feet across the porch, to catch a faint and not
unpleasant odor of skunk through the open window as the breeze blows in
from the woods, and to find, as I found in hoeing my melons early this
morning, the pointed prints of a fox making in a confident and knowing
line toward the chicken-yard.

I have lived some forty years upon the earth (how the old hickory
outside my window mocks me!), and I have seen some startling changes in
wild animal life. Even I can recall a great flock of snowy herons, or
egrets, that wandered up from the South one year and stayed a while on
the Maurice River marshes, just as, in earlier times, it is recorded
that along the Delaware "the white cranes did whiten the river-bank
like a great snow-drift." To-day the snowy herons have all but
vanished from the remotest glades of the South; and my friend Finle