ed how a menace to their safety
might be easily and completely removed by the simple expedient taught
them by their careful parent.

Though she invariably took the utmost precaution against danger from
baited traps, the old she-badger was nevertheless surprised, almost as
much as were the cubs, at the incidents just described. At various times
she had sprung more than a dozen traps, but in each case her attention
had been directed to the trap only by the scent of iron, or of the human
hand. However faint that scent might be, and however mingled with the
smell of newly turned earth or of sap from bruised stalks of woodland
plants, she immediately detected it, rolled on the spot, and then noted
the signs around--the disturbed leaf-mould, and the foot-scent of man
leading back among the bilberry bushes, or down the winding paths
between the oaks, where, occasionally, she also found faint traces of
the hand-scent on bits of lichen, or on rotten twigs, fallen from the
grasp of her enemy as he clutched the tree-trunks in his steep descent
towards the riverside. But never before had she seen a baited trap. Her
dam had never seen one; her grand-dam had been equally ignorant; and yet
both, like herself, had always rolled on any tainted flesh they chanced
to come across on their many journeys.

For generations, in this far county of the west, the creatures of the
woods, except the fox, had never been systematically hunted. The
vicissitudes of history had directly affected the welfare of wild
animals. The old professional hunting and fighting classes had become
unambitious tenant farmers; and, partly through the operations of an old
Welsh law regarding the equal division of property, the land beyond the
feudal tracts of the Norman Marches were, in many instances, broken up
into small freeholds owned by descendants of the princely families of
bygone ages. But hard, incessant work was the lot of tenant and
freeholder alike. When the aims and the experiences of the old fighting
and sporting days had passed away, and nothing was left but ceaseless
toil, these essentially combative people, to whom violent and continuous
excitement was the very breath of life, became, for a while at least,
knavish and immoral, sunk almost to one dead social level, and totally
uninteresting because, in their new life of peaceful tillage--a life far
more suited to their English law-givers than to themselves--they were
apparently incapable of maintaining