The Springfield Fox 



well the poison's power; she knew the poison 

 bait, and would have taught him had he lived 

 to know and shun it too. But now at last 

 when she must choose for him a wretched pris- 

 oner's life or sudden death, she quenched the 

 mother in her breast and freed him by the one 

 remaining door. 



It is when the snow is on the ground that 

 we take the census of the woods, and when the 

 winter came it told me that Vix no longer 

 roamed the woods of Erindale. Where she 

 went it never told, but only this, that she was 

 gone. 



Gone, perhaps, to some other far-off haunt 

 to leave behind the sad remembrance of her 

 murdered little ones and mate. Or gone, may 

 be, deliberately, from the scene of a sorrowful 

 life, as many a wild-wood mother has gone, by 

 the means that she herself had used to free her 

 young one, the last of all her brood. 



224 



