204 THE FOX 



legs are a clear grey shading into white ; the pads 

 are black like the ears. There is a white tag to the 

 brush, but not a very large one. 



Luckily the skin of the common fox, in spite 

 of its beauty, is not of much value, though the skin 

 of the fox in other countries is a considerable article 

 of commerce, and as many as 100,000 skins of the 

 various American foxes come to England every year. 

 From Germany about 500,000 are exported every 

 year, and nearly as many from Russia. Thus over 

 1,000,000 fox-skins find their way into the market. 

 Among these are included some of the rarest and 

 most expensive furs, that of the silver fox, whose pelt 

 of the black variety may be worth anything from 5o/. 

 upwards, according to the state of the fur market, 

 down to the ordinary red fox, worth at its best about 

 two shillings. 



But after all our own little red fox is more 

 valuable than any of them, since if the others are 

 worth much when dead he costs far more to kill ; and 

 the English fox, as I shall show elsewhere, represents 

 an investment of capital and expenditure of income 

 beside which the Hudson Bay Company itself is but 

 a small matter. To put it in another way, a cloak 

 of our common fox-skins fairly killed in the hunting 

 field would represent a sum of money far exceeding 



