THE SCARCITY OF SKUNKS 93 



than balances his debt for com and chickens by 

 his destruction of obnoxious vermin. He feeds 

 upon insects and mice, destroying great numbers 

 of the latter by digging out the nests and eat- 

 ing the young. But we forget our debt when the 

 chickens disappear, no matter how few we lose. 

 Shall we ever learn to say, when the red-tail 

 swoops among the pigeons, when the rabbits get 

 into the cabbage, when the robins rifle the cherry 

 trees, and when the skunk helps himself to a hen 

 for his Thanksgiving dinner shall we ever 

 learn to love and understand the fitness of things 

 out-of-doors enough to say, 'But then, poor 

 beastie, thou maun live ' *? " 



Since writing those warm lines I had made 

 further studies upon the skunk, all establishing 

 the more firmly my belief that there is a big bal- 

 ance to the credit of the animal. Meantime, too, 

 I had bought this small farm, with a mowing field 

 and an eight-acre wood-lot on it; with certain 

 liens and attachments on it, also, due to human 

 mismanagement and to interference with the 

 course of Nature in the past. Into the orchard, 

 for instance, had come the San Jose scale; into 

 the wood-lot had crawled the gypsy-moth hu- 



