here,
unseen, they could watch the rooks sail slowly overhead, and the
pigeons, with a sharp hiss of swiftly beating wings, drop down into the
trees, and flutter, cooing loudly, from bough to bough before they fell
asleep. Then, after a twilight romp in and about the mouth of the
burrow, the badgers took up the business of the night, and wandered away
over the countryside in search of food, sometimes extending their
journeys even as far as the garden of a cottage five miles distant,
where Brock distinguished himself by overturning a hive and devouring
every particle of a new honeycomb found therein.

Autumn, beautiful with pearly mists and red and golden leaves, again
succeeded summer, and the woods resounded with the music of the
huntsman's horn, as the hounds "harked forward" on the scent of fleeing
fox-cubs, that had never heard, till then, the cries of the pursuing
pack.

One morning, Brock lay out in the undergrowth, though the sun was high
and the rest of his family slept safely in the burrow. At the time, his
temper was not particularly sweet, for, on returning to the "set" an
hour before dawn, he had quarrelled with his sire. Among the dead leaves
and hay strewn on the floor of the chamber usually inhabited by the
badgers in warm weather, was an old bone, discovered by Brock in the
woods, and carried home as a plaything. For this bone Brock had
conceived a violent affection, almost like that of a child for a
limbless and much disfigured doll. He would lie outstretched on his bed,
for an hour at a time, with his toy between his fore-feet, vainly
sucking the broken end for marrow, or sharpening his teeth by gnawing
the juiceless knob, with perfect contentment written on every line of
his long, solemn face. If disturbed, he would take the bone to the
winter "oven" below, and there, alone, would toss it from corner to
corner and pounce on it with glee, or, with a sudden change of manner,
would grasp it in his fore-paws, roll on his back, and scratch, and
bite, and kick it, till, tired of the fun, he dropped asleep beside his
plaything; while overhead, the rabbits and the voles, at a loss to
imagine what was happening in the dark hollows of the "earth," quaked
with fear, or bolted helter-skelter into the bushes beyond the mound.

When, just before the quarrel, Brock sought for his bone, as he was wont
to do on returning home, he scented it in the litter beneath a spot
completely overlapped on every side by some pa