d, I gradually mounted
the steep ascent, and peeped over the edge of the rock on which the fox
lay. Despite my excessive caution, he was aware of my presence. Slowly
and drowsily he lifted his head, uttered a feeble half-grunt, half-whine
of alarm, and for a moment bared his teeth defiantly. I remained
absolutely still. Then his head fell back, and with a tremor of pain he
stretched a stiffened limb. I crawled across the ledge to a rugged path
among the cliffs, and descended to the shore. Next day I found him on
the rock again, lying in the same position, but dead, while far up in
the blue the sea-birds circled and called, and far below, at the edge of
the flowing tide, the crested billows leaped and sang.

His "mask" hangs above my study door. It has been placed there--not as
a thing of beauty. The hard, set pose devoid of grace, the bent, dried
ears once ever on the alert, the glassy, artificial eyes in sockets once
tenanted by living balls of fire that glowed in the darkness of the
night--all are unreal and expressionless. Yet the "mask" suggests a
hundred pictures, and when I turn aside and forget for a moment the
unreality of this poor image of death, I wander, led by fancy, among the
moonlit woods, where the red mouse rustles past, and the mournful cry of
the brown owl floats through the beeches' shadowed aisles. Then I hear a
sudden wail, that echoes from hillside to hillside, as the vixen calls
to Vulp: "The night is white; man is asleep; I hunt alone!" And the fox,
standing at the edge of the clearing, sends back his sharp, glad answer,
"I come!"

THE BROWN HARE.

I.

THE UPLAND CORNFIELD.

In midsummer, when the sun rises over the hillside opposite my home its
first bright beams glance between the branches of a giant oak in the
hedgerow of a cornfield above the wooded slope, and sparkle on my study
window. And when at evening the valley is deeply shadowed, the light
seems to linger in benediction on the same cornfield, where the great
oak-tree, no longer silhouetted darkly against a golden dawn, shines
faintly, with a radiance borrowed from the west, against the pearl-blue
curtain of the waning day. Except during the early morning or at dusk,
the cornfield does not stand out conspicuously in the landscape. The eye
is attracted by the striking picture of the woodland wall stretching
across the slope from the brink of the river, or by the lower prospect
of peaceful meadows and orchards through whic