282 THE DAILY LIFE OF OUR FARM. 



The bailiff and I had been looking at the bird with some 

 amusement during his afternoon meal, and observed 

 that by some means he had lost an eye, a misfortune 

 which possibly caused his quaint air. Perhaps, too, it 

 was with a view to protection that he haunted the neigh- 

 bourhood of the kennel, keeping his extinguished light 

 on that side, as the one-eyed hind of which there is record 

 in ^sop s fable. Reynard is 'cute enough, and no doubt 

 argued that where there is a kennel there is probably 

 too a chain, and so he ventured up, choking our hero's 

 throat by one snap of his lancet fangs, and completing 

 his triumph by devouring the greater part of him on a 

 neighbouring fallow. This was bad enough, and we 

 were at once on the qui vive, but it happened that a few 

 days later the children going to a low-lying meadow, 

 beside a brook, to gather violets, came across the carcase 

 of a vixen fox, with brush and foreleg gone, and a piece 

 of lamb in immediate proximity. An immense forest 

 and a large tract of rocks, inaccessible to hounds, being 

 situate not many miles hence, the foxes breed there in 

 great numbers, although until lately they have not 

 troubled our hen-house. I am afraid that under all cir- 

 cumstances there was about our homestead a feeling of 

 something like exultation that the thief was caught, and 

 the ducks got their freedom again. A fortnight from 

 that date, however, only last Monday morning, as we 

 arrived to look round, the henwife took a mallard's 

 gorgeous head from a cleft in a twisted pear-tree, saying, 

 " Master Fox has been here again." On the evening 

 before I had been watching with so much delight the 

 love-making rambles of the various pairs as they went 

 working about in the old grass, and sucking ever and 

 anon what seemed especially delicious, something I could 



