knoll by my beehives. I have
taken over from its wild inhabitants fourteen acres in Hingham; but,
beginning with the fox, the largest of my wild creatures, and counting
only what we commonly call "animals" (beasts, birds, and reptiles),
there are dwelling with me, being fruitful and multiplying, here on
this small plot of cultivated earth this June day, some seventy species
of wild things--thirty-six in feathers, fourteen in furs (not reckoning
in the muskrat on the other side of the road), twelve in scales, four
in shells, nine in skins (frogs, newts, salamanders)--seventy-five in
all.

Here is a multiple life going serenely and abundantly on in an
environment whose utter change from the primeval is hardly exaggerated
by phoebe's shift for a nest from a mossy ledge in the heart of the
ancient woods to a joist close up against the hot roof of my pigpen
behind the barn. From this very joist, however, she has already
brought off two broods since March, one of four and one of five.

As long as pigpens endure, and that shall be as long as the human race
endures, why should not the line of phoebes also endure? The case of
the fox is not quite the same, for he needs more room than a pigpen;
but as long as the domestic hen endures, if we will but give the fox
half the chance we give to phoebe, he too shall endure.

I had climbed the footpath from the meadow late one autumn evening, and
stood leaning back upon a short hay-fork, looking into the calm
moonlight that lay over the frosted field, and listening to the hounds
baying in the swamp far away to the west of me. You have heard at
night the passing of a train beyond the mountains; the creak of
thole-pins round a distant curve in the river; the closing of a barn
door somewhere down the valley. The far-off cry of the hounds was
another such friendly and human voice calling across the vast of the
night.

How clear their cries and bell-like! How mellow in the distance,
ringing on the rim of the moonlit sky, round the sides of a swinging
silver bell! Their clanging tongues beat all in unison, the sound
rising and falling through the rolling woodland and spreading like a
curling wave as the pack broke into the open over the level meadows.

I caught myself picking out the individual voices as they spoke, for an
instant, singly and unmistakable, under the wild excitement of the
drive, then all together, a fiercer, faster chorus as the chase swept
unhindered across the m