ery appearance of being _bona fide_ should be settled in
full. But the hunt can't afford it, one is told. In that case people
ought to subscribe more. If men paid ten pounds for every hunter they
owned, the income of most establishments would be more than doubled.

The farmers are wonderfully long-suffering on the whole, but they cannot
be expected to welcome a whole multitude of strangers; nor can they
allow large fields to ride over their land in these bad times without
compensation of some sort. Slowly, but surely, a change is coming over
our ideas of hunting rights and hunting courtesy; and the sooner we
realise that we ought to pay for our hunting on the same scale as we do
for shooting and fishing, the better will it be for all concerned.

Talking of hunting and foxes reminds me that a short time ago I went to
investigate an earth to see if a vixen was laid down there. Finding no
signs of any cubs, I was just going away when I saw a feather sticking
out of the ground a few yards from the fox-earth. I pulled four young
thrushes, a tiny rabbit, and two young water-rats out of this hole, and
re-buried them. The cubs, it afterwards appeared, were laid up in a
rabbit burrow some distance away. But the old vixen kept her larder near
her old quarters, instead of burying her supplies for a rainy day close
to the hole where she had her cubs. Perhaps she was meditating moving
the litter to this earth on some future occasion.

I shall never forget discovering this litter. When looking down a
rabbit-hole I heard a scuffle. A young cub came up to the mouth of the
hole, saw me, and dashed back again into the earth. This was the
smallest place I ever saw cubs laid up in. The vixen happened to be a
very little one.

It is amusing to watch the cubs playing in the corn on a summer's
evening. If you go up wind you can approach within ten yards of them.
Round and round they gambol, tumbling each other over for all the world
like young puppies. They take little notice of you at first; but after a
time they suddenly stop playing, stare hard at you for half a minute,
then bolt off helter-skelter into the forest of waving green wheat.

One word more about the scent of foxes. Not long ago a man wrote to the
_Field_ saying that he had proved by experiment that on the saturation
or relative humidity of the air the hunter's hopes depend: in fact, he
announced that he had solved the riddle of scent. It so happened that
for some years the