TGe Lay of the Band 
slope, was his burrow, which was one of the latest 
of the forty-six holes to be discovered. 
When I shall have been milking and huckle- 
berrying and hen’s nesting and aimlessly wandering 
over these fourteen acres for five years more, I shall 
have found, it may be, the very last of the wood- 
chuck holes. No, not in five, nor in five hundred 
years, for the families in the old holes keep multi- 
plying, and the new holes keep multiplying too. 
But woodchucks are not the only “things,” not the 
only crop that the farm yields, although it must cer- 
tainly seem that there can be little room on these 
scant acres for anything more. My farming, how- 
ever, is intensive, —from the tops of my tallest pines 
to the bottoms of my deepest woodchuck burrows, — 
so that I have an abundant crop of crows, chip- 
munks, muskrats, mice, skunks, foxes, and rabbits 
(few rabbits, I ought to say, because of the many 
foxes). 
Lately I found a den of young foxes within bark- 
ing distance of the house, but along a stony ridge 
on the adjoining farm. No one would believe in 
the number of foxes (or the number of times I have 
counted the’ same fox) here on the farm, and this 
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