"I'd ought to think about it." Henry's eyes left her face, traveled to the streak of winter sun which sprayed across his bed; it crawled a little farther each day. All that money! He hadn't thought of money. He closed his eyes sharply.

"Henry!" Mrs. Potts's frightened breathing was close to his face. "I ain't made you worse? Does something hurt you?"

"No." Henry looked at her again. "I was just having an idea. Maria -his voice steadied as he spoke "there's that monument subscription. It wouldn't be exactly charity-if they gave you some of that for the insurance, would it? Even if it meantwell, not such a good stone?" The words riddled his golden sphere, offering a piece of it in barter.

Maria sank into her chair, hugging her arms against her breast. "There ain't any." Her lips shut grimly.

"Any what?"

"Ed Collins started it. And thenhis boy told Henry at school-said he felt funny about raising monuments when men weren't dead yet. The boys said mean things to Henry. He was awful mad. You heard him hollering yesterday noon."

"Did they think I ought to die sooner?" Mr. Potts whispered. All about him lay the ruins of his glory.

"I don't know. I don't know!" Mrs. Potts suddenly dropped her head to the bed, her thick shoulders heaving.

"Why, Maria! Don't, Maria!" She lifted her face, gulping. "Who even comes to ask about you now? Mrs. Willie, next door- Oh, folks go

on, no matter what anybody did, so long's they ain't hurt."

"Maria, don't take on-" He watched her rub the tears from her eyes. "I'll think about that insurance."

She rose wearily. "I shouldn't of worried you."

"Maybe I can think of a way. I got time to think. You go have a rest.

He heard her closing the draught of the stove in the dining-room before she climbed the stairs. When the sound of her heavy feet had ceased, he glanced toward the wash-stand. The newspaper had slipped down out of sight. No matter. He knew the article by heart now. But that wasn't what he was to think about. He thrust away from him the shadow of doubt as to what lay behind the words.

One hundred and fifteen dollars! If it wasn't paid! Suddenly his eyes strained wide, staring at the crack which ran across the white ceiling. Then he gave a little grunt, doubling in his lips to moisten them. There must be some other way. After a long interim, when he scarcely breathed, he began to talk to himself, a thin thread of words from his rigid body.

"You've been hanging around just to enjoy yourself, old Henry Potts. Bothering folks. Just that one way for you to fix things up. That'd fix everything. An' if it sort of scares you, letting gowell-go ahead!" He closed his eyes. "Can't pretend I'm a hero any more,' he muttered. Then he lost himself in a rush of icy blackness. Later his heart stirred slightly. He heard the doctor's voice across the dark:

"The stimulants won't take hold. He must have lost courage to sink this way-"

Čourage! The word enticed him back into the light. He was climbing up the side of a great precipice, terrifying, frozen blackness below him, warm light above. Just as he felt his fingers over the edge, he remembered. Clinging there, he heard the doctor: "Quickly, that needle! He's coming back-' He could have swung himself up into the familiar light. But the other was the only way for Maria and the boy. With a little gasp he loosened his fingers, and dropped.

UR game warden was in reminiscent mood. It was Sunday, nobody had reported any set lines requiring a trip to a distant pond and a w search for the offending line and the culprits; the shooting season had not opened. He could sit on the porch in front of his house, with its treasures of stuffed horned owls, pheasants of every breed, partridges, woodcock, deer horns and heads, even the shed antlers of a Berkshire moose (there are now thirteen moose living wild in the woods of Berkshire County, Massachusetts, and there may be more before this article is printed), and talk at his

ease.

"There are more foxes in western Massachusetts to-day than there have been in many, many years," he said. "There isn't the shadow of a doubt but they are on the increase. They are not hunted nearly so much as they used to be, and while they are trapped, probably, a bit more, they are such crafty creatures that it doesn't serve to diminish their numbers. Did you ever have a fox laugh at you?"

We confessed that we had never enjoyed that experience.

up.

"Well, I have," said he. "It was a Long Island fox, years ago. My dad and I were hunting him, and dad stationed me at the end of a run and told me to wait while he drove him The fox came, all right, but before I could get a shot he sprang up on a stone wall-we called it a stone fence on Long Island-and sat there directly between me and a herd of sheep. I couldn't fire without hitting a sheep, and he knew it. He just sat and looked at me a minute, with his mouth open and his sides shaking with laughter. If ever an animal laughed, he did. Then he sprang down right into the middle of the flock, and drove them across the pasture, keeping himself sur

rounded all the way. I never had a chance at him. When dad came up he was mad, I tell you. 'The old fox laughed at me, dad,' I cried.

'Who wouldn't laugh at you?' dad said. I guess he knew I was kind of glad the fox got away. My job now is saving wild things, not killing 'em, and while the foxes get a lot of chickens and hens every year, along with partridges, pheasants, and rabbits (they've got thousands of rabbits the past two winters), I'm not at all sure they don't pay for what they take by their destruction of mice and other objectionable things. Anyhow, they're too smart to destroy."

Those people, indeed, who have not made an effort to explore the woods and fields, have little idea how much wild life still lives close to our habitations in the old northeastern States, even of the fur-bearing or flesh-eating breeds, from muskrat and mink and weasels up to wildcats. It will probably surprise most readers to learn that from a single village of two thousand people on the Housatonic River in northwestern Connecticut $15,000 worth of furs is exported every spring, the majority of them muskrat pelts, of course, but many fox and even otter skins being of the number. A Southern darky, now a resident of this town, told with pride of the catch made by a friend of his.

"Twas an o'ter," he said, "an' Sam got fo' dollars a foot fo' dat hide, yassuh, fo' dollars a foot, an' it wore six feet long!"

Even more surprising to most people than the size of Sam's otter, and better authenticated, will be the statement that the treasurer of Berkshire County, Massachusetts, has paid out five-dollar bounties for 262 wildcats in the fifteen years since 1903, when the bounty law took effect-an average of 17.5 a year, with the 1917 figures incomplete. To the thousands of mo

tor tourists who pass through this beautiful section of New England every season, even to the occupants of the summer estates which dot our hills and gracious valleys, it will doubtless seem strange that so formidable a forest beast as the wildcat should still prowl the woods. It only shows how little most of us nowadays know about our fourfooted neighbors.

I have recently acquired a twohundred acre farm in southern Berkshire, under the shadow of Mount Everett, or the Dome, as we more familiarly call it. One-half of the farm runs up the mountain-side, the other half is comparatively level land at the foot, and the two halves are bisected by the so-called Under Mountain Road, the main motor highway from New York to the Berkshires. On a pleasant Saturday in summer I suppose as many as a thousand cars may pass my door. Yet one of the first discoveries I made in going over the land was a fox's den in a stone wall not over two hundred feet from the road. The main entrance to the den was underneath a large stone at the base of the wall, quite hidden from the field by a tangle of bushes. There was a second entrance, however, above this stone, leading into the hollows of the wall, and so down, presumably, into the ground. The top of the stone in front of this upper entrance was covered with yellowish soil from the fox's fur, and there were numerous scratches where the animal had slipped a little and used his claws. There was no path leading away, showing that this fox apparently used the top of the wall as his approach and exit, from which he could leap far out into the cleared field at any point and leave no track.

About three hundred yards back from the road, on top of a rocky nub covered with large sugar-maples and trailing bittersweet-vines, I found a second fox's burrow, this time in the open ground. It was quite fresh and constantly occupied, for a plain path led away from it through the vines to the field below. This path was about ten inches wide, and perfectly plain to a casual glance. Probably the puppies had been using it all summer (it was August 1st when

I found it). I have waited patiently near by many an hour since, when I should have been working, for a sight of them, but so far in vain. About six feet from this fresh burrow is an old burrow, last year's, apparently, and just outside the mouth, on the upper side, is a pile of bleached bones six inches high and a foot across. There were at least three chicken wish-bones in the pile. Yet the farmer of whom I bought the place had an active and sagacious dog. I suppose when I get the farm stocked again I, too, shall pay tribute. But I shall make the old fox reward me with a puppy for a pet.

Did you ever have a little fox for a pet? No animal on earth has such a bright, sagacious face-as, indeed, no animal on earth is so sagacious, so capable of reasoning and of applying experience to new combinations of circumstances, which is but the proof of reasoning. When I was a little boy of six or seven I had a pet fox all one blissful summer. He was one of a litter captured by a farmer, and had been raised by hand. The rest died, but by late June, when he came into my possession, this little fellow was a hardy, active, well-formed foxling, with a big, swinging tail and the two brightest, snapping, twinkling eyes in the world. He lived in a dog-house by the barn, on a long chain, and went into canine spasms of welcome when I approached, leaping at once to my shoulder, where he would sit and chew off the rim of my straw hat like a puppy. Once he got hold of my ear by mistake, and I learned that learned that foxes have teeth. He would go around with me on a leash, nearly pulling me off my feet, and showing no fear whatever of human beings. But as he grew larger he developed a too-active dislike to other people, though never to me (nor did he, as I recall, become inactive and broodingly morose, as so many captured foxes do). At last it was decreed that he must be shot, however. My tears and pleading won for him a mitigation of this sentence to banishment to the woods, and one late August day his collar and chain were removed. He made a couple of glad bounds, trotted leisurely off across the fields, and was never seen by me again.

even the lumbermen are such hunters. The efforts of the mother fox to save her little ones are sometimes pathetic. A year or two ago, in the woods of northern Michigan, two lumbermen saw a fox's den and poked into it. Nothing happened, so they went on. Returning at night, they saw that fresh tracks led from this den to

a newly dug burrow not far away, and surmised that the mother fox had moved her family. Thereupon they started digging. As they dug they could hear the fox digging ahead of them in the ground, and it became evident she was tunneling in a circle, to reach the entrance ahead of them and escape. So one of the men dug ahead to cut her off, and the other dug behind her. The latter digger came speedily upon four puppies, and the former reached the old fox' herself. She had been forced to abandon most of her litter. in her mad effort to escape; but she was carrying one baby with her, all she could hope to save. Two other men from the same camp found a fox's hole in a fallen, hollow tree and started to chop the family out. In this case the mother drove all the family -five again-up the center of a hollow branch ahead of her. The choppers came upon her from behind. They tied her hind legs together and then tied this thong to a pole, thus pulling her out from a safe distance, for she was fighting mad, and a fox's bite is not a pleasant thing. In front of her