-a deep underground hollow with several main
passages and upper galleries, where, as I have good reason to believe, a
fox also dwells--an otter's "holt" beneath gnarled alder-roots fringing
the river-bank, and another fox's "earth," all on the outskirts of a
wooded belt not more than a mile from my home, and all showing signs of
having long been inhabited.

Unless systematically persecuted, the fox, the otter, and the badger
cling to their respective haunts with such tenacity that, season after
season, they prowl along the same familiar paths through the woods or by
the river, and rear their young in the same retreats. This is the case
especially with the badger; from the traditions of the countryside, as
well as from the careful observation of sporting landowners, it may be
learned that for generations certain inaccessible "sets" have seldom, if
ever, been uninhabited. Always at nightfall the "little man in grey" has
climbed the slanting passage from his cave-like chamber, ten or--if
among the boulders of some ancient cairn--even from twenty to thirty
feet below the level of the soil, and sniffed the cool evening air, and
listened intently for the slightest sound of danger, before departing on
his well worn trail to hunt and forage in the silent upland pastures.
And with the first glimpse of light, when the hare stole past towards
her "form," and the fox, a shadowy figure drifting through the haze of
early dawn, returned to the dense darkness of the lonely wood, he has
sought his daytime snuggery of leaves and grass industriously gathered
from the littered glades.

In a deep burrow at the foot of a hill, about a quarter of a mile from a
farmstead built on a declivity at a bend of the broad river, Brock, the
badger, was born, one morning about the middle of spring. Three other
sucklings, like himself blind and wholly dependent on their parents'
care, shared his couch of hay and leaves. Day by day, the mother badger,
devoted to their welfare, fed and tended her unusually numerous
offspring, lying beside them on the comfortable litter, while the sire,
occupying a snug corner of the ample bed, dozed the lazy hours away; and
evening after evening, when twilight deepened into darkness as night
descended on the woods, she arose, shook a few seed-husks from her coat,
and with her mate adjourned to an upper gallery leading to the main
opening of the "set," whence, assured that no danger lurked in the
neighbourhood of their hom