Page:The clerk of the woods.djvu/202

184 and once had stopped to scratch at the back side of it.

"He knew what was in there," said I. The farmer laughed.

"Oh, he is an old fellow," he answered. "I have a trap set for him just where he used to pass. Now he crosses the field, but he goes round that spot! I see his tracks. They say it is easy to trap foxes. Perhaps it is; but it isn't for me."

Yet he has shown me—not this year—more than one handsome skin.

Once, too, he showed me the fox himself. Hounds were baying in the distance as I came to the house on my Sunday morning walk, and we spoke of their probable course. He thought it likely that they would cross a certain field, and taking a by-road that would carry us within sight of it, we kept our eyes out till the dogs seemed to have diverged in the wrong direction. Then I was walking carelessly along, talking as usual (a bad habit of mine), when my companion seized me by both shoulders and swung me sharply about. "Look at that!" he said. And there stood the fox, five or ten