to increase.

Only 800 pairs of live foxes were placed on sale last year. Fewer than
50 of that number were killed and their fur sold. The rest went for
breeding purposes, because fur farms are starting up in many favorable
places. The men who raise silver foxes on Prince Edward Island know the
game. They started in it as boys many years ago.

"In the provinces of Prince Edward, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick, men
and women interested in breeding foxes have been made wealthy. They were
poor people ten years ago. Today they live in town houses, own their own
automobiles, and yet continue to give the strictest attention to all the
details connected with their singular farming industry."

Obed was extremely modest in what he told concerning his own small
beginning. Max, having also read in one of the clippings that a pair of
gilt-edged silver black foxes were worth all the way up to $30,000, was,
of course, doubly curious to learn whether those with which Obed started
could be the genuine article, and if so, how had he managed to obtain
them.

It seemed to be only a game in which rich persons could enter. Obed
understood just what must be passing in the mind of the other, and at
the first opportunity he hastened to explain.

"I was just chock full o' this business," he went on to say, "when I
ran across Mr. Coombs. Yuh remember I told yuh about how that came
about, and that he seemed to think I'd saved his life." Well, he and me
kept house together here for some months, and then one day thar come the
biggest surprise I ever had. He fetched a crate along up from town in a
wagon he hired; and say, inside the same was the finest pair o' silver
blacks I ever saw. Then some more wagons begun to show up fetchin' rolls
of wire netting, and bags o' cement to make concrete with. Mr. Coombs
had gone into the fur raisin' business for keeps, and I was to have an
interest in the game. He had an agreement all written out that both o'
us signed before a justice, which fixed things up. Half the proceeds o'
the fur farm was to come to me, while I stayed here to look after
things.

"Well, sir, we worked like fun to git the stockade built 'cording to
form; and our mated pair o' foxes planted in the same. Since then I've
fixed three more enclosures, ready for an increase o' stock. Mr. Coombs,
he called this the Lone Lodge Black Fox Farm, and I guess the name will
stick even after I get to selling off some o' the product."

It was sim