IC >4 ZOOLOGICAL SKETCHES. 



his legs and his eyes turned yellow. After sunset, 

 however, on being exposed to the cool night-wind, he 

 revived and crawled away, — to the sanitarium of the 

 wilderness, it was supposed ; but two years after, his 

 remains, known by a rusty wire collar, were discovered 

 below the effluent pipe of a hot-house, which he could 

 have reached only by digging under the foundation- 

 timbers. 



The strategists trained in the school of the Corsican 

 campeador cannot have chosen the moment of attack 

 with a closer calculation of all circumstances than the 

 nocturnal prowlers that prey upon our orchards and 

 hen-roosts. Their practice seems to contradict the idea 

 that people sleep soundest before midnight : between 

 one and two a.m. is the ghost-hour, — the time when 

 most Christians are actually asleep, and foxes, weasels, 

 and burglars most wide-awake. During a vacation of 

 my boarding-school years I once helped to watch a 

 poultry-house whose tenants had begun to disappear in 

 a way that suggested the agency of a domestic traitor. 

 From ten till twelve the barking of numerous curs 

 facilitated our vigils ; soon after midnight the late guest 

 of the village tavern extinguished his candle; but still 

 there was in the air that something not traceable to 

 any single cause and resulting rather from the co- 

 operation of many small sounds, — the creaking of a 

 gate, the distant rumbling of a night-coach, a whispered 

 dialogue. But at one o'clock all was still, and half an 



