Trapping everything would be bad business. You would not catch squirrels in a trap any more than you would shoot bluebirds or brown thrashers. One could easily damage his neighbourhood and himself by trapping the wrong things or trapping in the wrong way. A trapper who is a sportsman will see to it that his traps are of the right kind. I would not have a mouse-trap in the house that made a practice of catching mice by the foot or tail. There are traps of many kinds for a variety of purposes and the trapper must either catch his prey alive and provide a way of despatching it humanely or use a trap which is instantaneous in its deadly work. [Illustration: Box-trap and figure 4] Boys who have learned to trap in the natural, legitimate way do not become "fish butchers" or "game hogs" when they grow up. I once saw a picture of a game warden standing triumphantly beside a mound of dead crows, two thousand and twelve was the number, I believe. He had cunningly learned to imitate their call so successfully that they could not resist coming within range of his deadly weapon. Crows may be harmful to wild fowl but no boy with right instincts would be guilty of an act so base as this, so unbecoming a sportsman and a gentleman. Getting rid of the animals which prey upon orchard, garden, and chicken roost is, without question, one of the ways of making the country a better place to live in. Trapping may be regarded as clean sport when done for this purpose, or for food when needed. Catching animals alive for the sake of taming and training them as pets is treated in another chapter and has its own rules. There are a number of fur-bearing animals which, though too shy to venture inside the barn yard, prey so successfully upon the less fortunate ones, that it has become our duty to take up warfare against them. This duty is all the more heavily laid upon us because, in the act of civilizing the woods and converting the hills and valleys into cultivated fields and pastures, we have destroyed the natural hiding places of the wild things and "upset the balance." If we were suddenly to abandon this country, it would not be many generations before the buffalo, the wild pigeon, and the wild turkey would return to their haunts, the forests would recover the hills, the potato beetle would go back to its Colorado weed, and some natural enemy would control the San José scale and the English sparrow and reduce them to their natural places.