the boys and young men dearly love the sport.  The party sets out about eight or nine o’clock of a dark, moonless night, and stealthily approaches the cornfield.  The dog knows his business, and when he is put into a patch of corn and told to “hunt them up” he makes a thorough search, and will not be misled by any other scent.  You hear him rattling through the corn, hither and yon, with great speed.  The coons prick up their ears, and leave on the opposite side of the field.  In the stillness you may sometimes hear a single stone rattle on the wall as they hurry toward the woods.  If the dog finds nothing, he comes back to his master in a short time, and says in his dumb way, “No coon there.”  But if he strikes a trail, you presently hear a louder rattling on the stone wall, and then a hurried bark as he enters the woods, followed in a few minutes by loud and repeated barking as he reaches the foot of the tree in which the coon has taken refuge.  Then follows a pellmell rush of the cooning party up the hill, into the woods, through the brush and the darkness, falling over prostrate trees, pitching into gullies and hollows, losing hats and tearing clothes, till finally, guided by the baying of the faithful dog, the tree is reached.  The first thing now in order is to kindle a fire, and, if its light reveals the coon, to shoot him; if not, to fell the tree with an axe.  If this happens to be too great a sacrifice of timber and of strength, to sit down at the foot of the tree till morning.

But with March our interest in these phases of animal life, which winter has so emphasized and brought out, begins to decline.  Vague rumors are afloat in the air of a great and coming change.  We are eager for Winter to be gone, since he, too, is fugitive and cannot keep his place.  Invisible hands deface his icy statuary; his chisel has lost its cunning.  The drifts, so pure and exquisite, are now earth-stained and weather-worn,—­the flutes and scallops, and fine, firm lines, all gone; and what was a grace and an ornament to the hills is now a disfiguration.  Like worn and unwashed linen appear the remains of that spotless robe with which he clothed the world as his bride.

But he will not abdicate without a struggle.  Day after day he rallies his scattered forces, and night after night pitches his white tents on the hills, and would fain regain his lost ground; but the young prince in every encounter prevails.  Slowly and reluctantly the gray old hero retreats up the mountain, till finally the south rain comes in earnest, and in a night he is dead.

IV.  THE FOX

I have already spoken of the fox at some length, but it will take a chapter by itself to do half justice to his portrait.

He furnishes, perhaps, the only instance that can be cited of a fur-bearing animal that not only holds its own, but that actually increases in the face of the means that are used for its extermination.  The beaver, for instance, was gone before the earliest settlers could get a sight of him; and even the mink and marten are now only rarely seen, or not seen at all, in places where they were once abundant.