WILD FIDELITY. 
rT HERE was a heath, blasted by wind, 
brown, stubbly, forlorn, whereon nothing 
grew more than a foot or two high. There 
was nothing alive on the heath, save one man, 
with a gun and a sour face, who squelched 
slowly through black-green and mother-of- 
pearl-scummed puddles, and tripped over 
tough branchlets crawling about the wet 
ground like snakes; and there was the 
shrieking, jeering, taunting, tearing wind 
over all. 
Then a bird, a big bird, got up from the 
ground in front of the man, and flapped away 
in wavering silence, like some gigantic brown 
moth. 
Bang! 
The crashing, heavy report of the single- 
barrel gun butted into the wind and was lost. 
The bird, with a sudden, odd little shivering, 
turned from butting into the wind, and was 
lost sight of to leeward. The voice of the 
man, cursing his luck, was cut by the gale 
from his lips, and lost instantly, too. 
The man trudged on—an unhappy silhouette 
against a sky of gray wash. 
A hundred yards farther on a rabbit de- 
