A GREEN MOUNTAIN CORN-FIELD. 101 



comer welcome, S3 the wolf welcomes the 

 lamb. Against these hungry lovers of his 

 crop (who loved not unwisely, but too well), 

 the farmer had fenced his field with a single 

 string, stretched from corner to corner. He 

 must put extraordinary faith in the con- 

 siderateness of the birds, a looker-on might 

 think; such a barrier as this could be, at 

 the most, nothing more than a polite hint 

 of ownership, a delicate reminder against 

 thoughtless trespassing, a courteously indi- 

 rect suggestion to such as needed not a phy- 

 sical, but only a moral, restraint. Or one 

 might take it as an appeal to some known 

 or fancied superstitiousness on the crows' 

 part ; as if the white cord were a kind of 

 fetich, with which they would never pre- 

 sume to meddle. But the rustic would have 

 laughed at all such far-fetched cockneyish 

 inferences. This strange-seeming device of 

 his was simply an attempt to take the sus- 

 picious in their own suspiciousness ; to set 

 before Corvus a hindrance so unmistakably 

 insufficient that he would mistrust it as a 

 cover for some deep-laid and deadly plot. 

 Probably the scheme had not been crowned 

 with complete success in the present in- 



