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PASSIONAL ZOOLOGY. 
write. The same fellow doggedly pursued one of his friends for 
a miserable debt. When reproached with this procedure, so odi- 
ous for a republican: ‘‘What would you have!” replied he. “I 
have to feed my wife, my children, and two horses.” 
Porters, desirous of finding a lodge in any house, never forget, 
in order to gain the confidence of the proprietors, to declare them- 
selves without children. 
It is then in the month of May, when there are five more 
mouths to feed in the fox-earth, that the poultry yard, the deer 
park, and the rabbit warren, are subject to the most formidable 
attacks from these long-tailed marauders. To the father fox be- 
longs the direction of these nocturnal and diurnal expeditions ; to 
the mother, the care of dividing among the little ones the booty 
of the chase. When a fox gets into a poultry yard at this epoch, 
he does not restrict himself to strangling one fowl and carrying it 
off forthwith. He seizes on the whole live furniture of the estab- 
lishment. When he takes chickens he cannot take too many — 
thus say the speculators in stocks apropos of a fat job — then he 
ranges his victims in order, like a hunter his game, and quietly 
proceeds to pack up and carry off his merchandise. If the female 
is there, she assists him. What cannot be eaten up in one day is 
buried in cachettes. 
This instinctive foresight and habit of burying is common to all 
individuals of the great canine family, who are liable to starve, or 
to feed on mice and roots when the chase is unprofitable. 
Some even carry this precaution so far as to bury what they 
have already eaten once. . I have several times killed foxes by 
lying concealed near the quarter of a leveret, or the side of a fowl 
buried by one of these animals and upturned by the plow. It 
is not always the proprietor of the thing concealed that gets shot 
thus. I once killed a fox at full noon, behind the wall of a farm- 
house, while amusing himself with counting a half dozen capons 
which he had just taken, and who seemed to be so much ab- 
sorbed in his calculations that he allowed me to approach within 
fifteen steps of him. It was noon, the hour when the laborers 
had left their work, and when every one is at the dwelling-house 
partaking of the noon meal. 
