ber and the length
of the connecting passages are, as a rule, indicated by the size of the
mound before his door. The fact that he regularly pursues the same paths
in his nightly excursions enables him to become familiar, like the fox,
with each sight and scent and sound of the woods, so that anything
strange is at once noticed, and danger avoided. His sociability is a
distinct gain, because he receives therefrom co-operation in his sapping
and mining while he aims to secure the impregnability of his fortress;
and his tolerance of cunning and timid neighbours gains for him this
advantage: sometimes in the dusk, before venturing abroad, he receives a
warning that danger lurks in the thickets around his home--perhaps from
a double line of scent indicating that the fox has started on a journey
and then hurriedly turned back, or from numerous cross-scents at the
mouth of the burrow, where the rabbits and the wood-mice have passed to
and fro, deterred by fear in their frequent attempts to reach feeding
places beyond the nearest briar-clumps. His methods, however, when
either his neighbours or the members of his own family become too
numerous, are prompt and drastic.

Shy, inoffensive, and, for a young creature unacquainted with the
responsibilities of a family, deliberate to the point of drollery in all
his movements, Brock grew up beneath his parents' care; and, with an
intelligence keener than that possessed by the other members of the
little woodland family, learned many lessons which they failed to
understand. When his mother called, he was always the first to hasten to
her side. Each incident of the night, if of any significance, was
explained to her offspring by the mother. Often Brock was the only
listener when she began her story, and the late arrivals heard but
disconnected parts.

Beautiful beyond comparison were those brief summer nights, silent,
starlit, fragrant, when the badgers led their young by many a devious
path through close-arched bowers amid the tangled bracken, or under
drooping sprays of thorn and honeysuckle in the hidden ditches, or
through close tunnels, as gloomy as the passages of their underground
abode, in the dense thickets of the furze. Sometimes they wandered in
the corn and root-crop, or in the hayfield where the sorrel, a cooling
medicinal herb for many of the woodland folk, grew long and succulent;
and sometimes they descended the steep cattle-path on the far side of
the farm, where the