own account, but also through the sorrow and sympathy which the sight of a suffering and often, perhaps, a tenderly loved companion arouses in them. Another way of trapping, or of trying to trap, the foxes is by setting a loaded gun, with a string tied, at one end, to the trigger, and, at the other, to a piece of meat. The meat lies some thirty yards from the muzzle of the gun, with which, of course, it is in a straight line, and the string, for the whole distance, is buried under the snow, the gun being also concealed, either in the same or some other way. All that appears is the piece of meat, which lies, by itself, on the snow, as if it had nothing to do with anything. When the fox seizes it, however, he pulls the string, which in its turn pulls the trigger, and the gun, going off, shoots him dead[16]—a very humane sort of trap indeed. But it is just the same as with the other kinds. After a very few foxes, or, sometimes, after only a single one has been shot, no more are to be got in this way. The first poor victim lies upon the bloodstained snow, but over him bends his affectionate consort, whining and wretched, yet not so given up to grief but that the intellectual faculties are rather sharpened than obscured by the bitterness of the loss. The fatal cord attached to the meat, which, in despite of tears, she has perhaps managed to swallow down, lies now exposed. She follows it up, sniffing it and sometimes touching it with her paw, and soon arrives at the evil-looking object, which she knows has, for the time, exhausted its death-dealing power. A careful examination imprints it on her memory, and through life, now, in particular, she carries a picture in her mind of that string attached to the trigger. It was the pull that did it. With that there came a sudden flame, and the roar of death was in her ears. Three feet, at least, she leaped into the air—higher, possibly, if perchance a pellet or two struck her—and then raced away over the snow that was her husband’s winding-sheet. She returned to find him dead, and there, from his very jaws, from the protruded tongue that would never be passed over her in kindness and affection again, lay that thin dark line upon the snow, that connected him visibly with death. Never, in all her earthly pilgrimage, hereafter, will she forget that lumps of meat, though seeming to lie loose upon the ground, may yet make part of a trap, full twenty-five or thirty yards away, and that to touch them, whilst they do make part of it, means swift and certain death. But they may be disconnected. That thin and subtle ligament from which the whole danger proceeds is easy to sever; but how to sever it without setting in motion the thing to which it is attached—that little, insignificant-looking thing, which, as it is the part that the string touches, must be the key to set in motion the whole infernal machine? Smaller even than the pan of the well-known toothed trap, which, by being pressed on, causes the