eadows.

What was that? A twig that broke, some brittle oak leaf that cracked
in the path behind me! I held my breath as a soft sound of padded feet
came up the path, as something stopped, breathed, came on--as into the
moonlight, beyond the circle of shadow in which I stood, walked the fox.

The dogs were now very near and coming as swift as their eager legs
could carry them. But I was standing still, so still that the fox did
not recognize me as anything more than a stump.

No, I was more than a stump; that much he saw immediately. But how
much more than a stump?

The dogs were coming. But what was I? The fox was curious,
interested, and after trying to make me out from a distance, crept
gingerly up and sniffed at my shoes!

But my shoes had been soaked for an hour in the dew of the meadow and
seemed to tell him little. So he backed off, and sat down upon his
tail in the edge of the pine-tree shadow to watch me. He might have
outwatched me, though I kept amazingly still, but the hounds were
crashing through the underbrush below, and he must needs be off.
Getting carefully up, he trotted first this side of me, then that, for
a better view, then down the path up which he had just come, and into
the very throat of the panting clamor, when, leaping lightly aside over
a pile of brush and stones, he vanished as the dogs broke madly about
me.

Cool? It was iced! And it was a revelation to me of what may be the
mind of Nature. I have never seen anything in the woods, never had a
glimpse into the heart of Nature, that has given me so much confidence
in the possibility of a permanent alliance between human life and wild
life, in the long endurance yet of our vastly various animal forms in
the midst of spreading farms and dooryards, as this deliberate dodge of
the fox.

At heart Nature is always just as cool and deliberate, capable always
of taking every advantage. She is not yet past the panic, and probably
never will be; but no one can watch the change of age-long habits in
the wild animals, their ready adaptability, their amazing
resourcefulness, with any very real fears for what civilization may yet
have in store for them so long as our superior wit is for, instead of
against, them.

I have found myself present, more than once, at an emergency when only
my helping hand could have saved; but the circumstances have seldom
been due to other than natural causes--very rarely man-made. On the
contrary, man-