V THE BADGER AND HIS KIN 1 49 



ern dialects of Great Britain. This last is the con- 

 temptuous epithet that Shakespeare employs in 

 "Twelfth Night" (Act 2, Scene 5) when he makes 

 Sir Toby Belch mutter an aside of annoyance over 

 Malvolio's reading of the dropped letter, — " Marry, 

 hang thee, Brock ! " And do you not remember the 

 curious part of " next friend," or counsel and go- 

 between, that Grimbart, the badger, plays in the 

 legend of Reynard, the Fox ? 



It is amazing to see, in such favorable tracts as 

 have been mentioned, how the ground is pitted 

 and honey-combed with old and new burrows of 

 all sorts. The danger of your horse stepping into 

 an open hole is doubled by the chance of his crush- 

 ing through the roofs of unsuspected excavations. 

 Cattle-herding horses must actjuire dexterity in 

 avoiding such accidents, or they would break their 

 limbs and risk their riders' necks fifty times a day. 

 I shall never forget a wild morning I once spent 

 near Cheyenne, hunting antelopes with deerhounds. 

 The prairie horses — mine was a nervous gray that 

 seemed unable to stand on all four legs at once — 

 were eager to enter into the fun, and bore us 

 straight across the country, up the ridges and 

 down the hollows, over or around the clumps of 

 sage and grease-wood, at topmost speed, twisting 

 and dodging to avoid badger-earths, ant-hillocks, 

 prairie-dog holes, and tall bushes; and more than 

 once my horse seemed to take a new flight in the 

 air, when he rose to leap over a thicket, and caught 



