WHEN ALL THE WORLD IS YOUNG 119 



life when a school of weasels has thus attacked 

 him. 



We have little foxes in the Gorse Field, though 

 by strict preserver's right they are not ours. The 

 vixen drew out the earth in March, but it was only 

 one of two or three that she had her eye on, and she 

 ended by laying down her cubs a mile away, close 

 to the ruins of a Roman villa where some centurion 

 made his garrison duty in these parts as pleasant 

 as may be. 



The fox's ideas of housekeeping are something 

 like those of a large number of Londoners, who 

 having made one ' Ivanhoe ' or ' Balmoral ' quite 

 dirty by three years' occupancy, move on into a 

 brand-new one. When a vixen has a litter of cubs 

 in an earth, it is often less than three fortnights 

 before the too abundant contents of her larder 

 make the place uninhabitable, and then she moves 

 her family to other quarters. 



The earth in Gorse Field runs clean into the 

 limestone, the steep bank of the hill making thus 

 a green amphitheatre into which the tall i;hin 

 crack opens. The green grass of the year fringes 

 the rocky portal and almost hides it, leaving only 

 an indigo slit like any other shadow on very green 

 grass. That is a sunlight picture. When I go 

 in the evening to see the young foxes there is less 

 than that, and I have to use the sight of a little 

 yellow clay peeping through trampled grass to 

 give me the exact locality of the entrance. The 

 field is here full of these scratchings, which young 



