ed carefully the wild creatures of a thickly settled
region.

The case of the Indian will apply to all our other aborigines. It is
somewhat amazing to be told, as we are on good authority, that there
are probably more live Indians on the reservations to-day than there
were all told over all of North America when the white men first came
here. Certainly they have been persecuted, but they have also been
given protection--pens!

Wild life, too, will thrive, in spite of inevitable persecution and
repression, if given only a measure of protection.

Year by year the cities spread, the woods and wild places narrow, yet
life holds on. The fox trots free across my small farm, and helps
himself successfully from the poultry of my careful raising.

Nature--man-nature--has been hard on the little brute--to save him!
His face has grown long from much experience, and deep-lined with
wisdom. He seems a normal part of civilization; he literally passes in
and out of the city gates, roams at large through my town, and dens
within the limits of my farm. Enduring, determined, resourceful,
quick-witted, soft-footed, he holds out against a pack of enemies that
keep continually at his heels, and runs in his race the race of all
life, winning for all life, with our help, a long lease yet upon the
earth.

For here is Reynard sitting upon a knoll in the road, watching me tear
down upon him in a thirty-horse-power motor-car. He steps into the
bushes to let me pass, then comes back to the road and trots upon his
four adequate legs back to the farm to see if I left the gate of the
henyard open.

There is no sight of Nature more heartening to me than this glimpse of
the fox; no thought of Nature more reassuring than the thought of the
way Reynard holds his own--of the long-drawn, dogged fight that Nature
will put up when cornered and finally driven to bay. The globe is too
small for her eternally to hold out against man; but with the help of
man, and then in spite of man, she will fight so good a fight that not
for years yet need another animal form perish from the earth.

If I am assuming too much authority, it is because, here in the
remoteness of my small woods where I can see at night the lights of the
distant city, I have personally taken a heartless hand in this
determined attempt to exterminate the fox. No, I do not raise fancy
chickens in order to feed him. On the contrary, much as I love to see
him, I keep a double-barrel