made conditions out of doors--the multiplicity of fences,
gardens, fields, crops, trees, for the primeval uniformity of forest or
prairie--are all in favor of greater variety and more abundance of wild
life (except for the larger forms), because all of this means more
kinds of foods, more sorts of places for lairs and nests, more paths
and short cuts and chances for escape--all things that help preserve
life.

One morning, about two weeks ago, I was down by the brook along the
road, when I heard a pack of hounds that had been hunting in the woods
all night, bearing down in my direction.

It was a dripping dawn, everything soaked in dew, the leaf edges
beaded, the grass blades bent with wet, so that instead of creeping
into the bushes to wait for the hunt to drive by, I hurried up the road
to the steep gravel bank, climbed it and sat down, well out of sight,
but where I could see a long stretch of the road.

On came the chase. I kept my eyes down the road at the spot where the
trout brook turns at the foot of the slope, for here the fox, if on the
meadow side of the brook, would be pretty sure to cross--and there he
stood!

I had hardly got my eyes upon the spot, when out through a tangle of
wild grapevine he wound, stopped, glanced up and down, then dug his
heels into the dirt, and flew up the road below me and was gone.

He was a big fellow, but very tired, his coat full of water, his big
brush heavy and dragging with the dripping dew. He was running a race
burdened with a weight of fur almost equal to the weight of a full suit
of water-soaked clothes upon a human runner; and he struck the open
road as if glad to escape from the wallow of wet grass and thicket that
had clogged his long course.

On came the dogs, very close upon him; and I turned again to the bend
in the brook to see them strike the road, when, flash, below me on the
road, with a rush of feet, a popping of dew-laid dust, the fox!--back
into the very jaws of the hounds!--Instead he broke into the tangle of
grapevines out of which he had first come, just as the pack broke into
the road from _behind_ the mass of thick, ropy vines.

Those dogs hit the plain trail in the road with a burst of noise and
speed that carried them through the cut below me in a howling gale, a
whirlwind of dust, and down the hill and on.

Not one of the dogs came back. Their speed had carried them on beyond
the point where the fox had turned in his tracks and doubled hi