THE HUNTED FOX 103 



always thought that he owes something of his 

 reputation for cleverness to his face. His long nose, 

 oblique eyes and pricked ears, added to his swift, 

 easy, noiseless, stealthy action, have made people 

 think him cleverer than he is. Most artists who have 

 painted foxes have exaggerated the human cunning 

 and painted a bad man instead of a little wild animal, 

 which is only worse than other animals in that he is 

 more troublesome to man. But the fox suffers from the 

 fame the fabulists of all ages have given him, and the 

 way naturalists have played up to the story-tellers in 

 their descriptions and anecdotes. The fox-pictures 

 which illustrate this book are, I believe, free from this 

 fault, and the artists have seen and painted the fox as 

 he is in real life. As a matter of fact a hunted fox 

 cannot be compared for the ingenuity of his tricks and 

 stratagems with a hare or an old stag. Foxes in stone- 

 wall countries often run along the top of the walls. In 

 the Badminton book on ' Hunting ' there is a picture 

 of a famous Beaufort hound, Potentate, springing at 

 a fox on a wall. But I have never heard of a fox- 

 devising a trick of such subtlety as that of the hare 

 which ran along a wall till she came to a gateway, 

 jumped down, and then springing back on to the 

 wall, retraced her steps, and sprang off into a brake, 

 where she squatted. When the hounds arrived one 



