as most unwilling to do. Cautiously,
keeping his eyes on the sinister flaring orbs that faced him, he took a
step backwards. Still the lynx crouched, ready to spring. Then Logan
spoke, in quiet expostulation.

"Don't ye go for to fight _me_, now! I never done ye no hurt!" he argued
mendaciously. "It's them durn wolves, that was after the both of us; an'
it was me got ye out of that scrape. Don't ye come lookin' fer trouble,
for I don't want to hurt ye!"

At the sound of the quiet voice, soothing yet commanding, the tension of
the beast's madness seemed to relax. The fixity of his glare wavered.
Then his eyes shifted; and the next moment, turning with a movement so
quick that the woodsman's eyes could hardly follow it, he was away like
a gray shadow among the stumps and trunks, not leaping, but running
belly to ground like a cat. Logan watched him out of sight, then
nonchalantly put two wounded wolves out of their misery, whetted his
knife on his larrigans, and settled down to the task of stripping the
pelts.

When the Tide Came Over the Marshes

A perfect dome of palest blue, vapourous but luminous. To northward and
southeastward a horizon line of low uplands, misty purple. Along the
farthest west a glimmer and sparkle of the sea. Everywhere else, wide,
wind-washed levels of marsh, pallid green or ochre yellow, cut here and
there with winding tide-channels and mud-flats of glistening copper red.
Twisting this way and that in erratic curves, the unbroken, sodded lines
of the dyke, fencing off the red flats and tide-channels, and dividing
the green expanses of protected dyke-marsh from the ochre yellow
stretches of the salt marsh, as yet but half-reclaimed from the sea.

At this autumn season the hay had all been cut and cured and most of it
hauled away to safe storage in far-off, upland barns. But on the remoter
and wetter marshes some of it had been piled in huge yellow-gray,
cone-peaked stacks, to await the easier hauling of winter. The solitary,
snug-built stacks, towering above the dyke-tops and whistled over
ceaselessly by the long marsh winds, were a favoured resort of the
meadow-mice. These adaptable little animals were able to endure with
equanimity the inevitable annual destruction of their homes in the deep
grass, seeing that the haymakers were so thoughtful as to afford them
much dryer and more secure abodes in the heart of the stacks, where
neither the keen-nosed fox nor the keen-eyed marsh-owl c