blind people, thou art describing an exceptional
fox, no more like the average foxes than an
Albino is like an ordinary man, or a Yankee like
an Englishman:

"Foxes have the lateral crests of the skull,
which serve to attach the chrotaphite muscles
in the shape of an angle, but slighty prolonged
before they unite on the frontal suture."

Is not this throwing a stone at us when we
ask for bread? Is not this pelting us with
barbarous Latin and dog-Greek when we ask to
know something about foxes?

Another quarrel of ours with Mole is that he
is the dog in the manger—he does not write
natural history himself, and he barks at any one
else who wants to. And singular, although half
his science seems to consist in the mere
classification of animals, he always gives us
careless daubs of them—rude, raw, and impossible
in colour. Here, for instance, is the tricolored
fox of Virginia, in an expensive work on natural
history, coloured as barbarously as if it was a
Cupid holding a pincushion heart in a penny
valentine. "Silver grey" is represented by a
wash of lead colour, and "rufous" by raw
sienna, which also daubs up the eyes. Surely
no colour is better than wrong colour any day in
the week.

But Mole has not yet exhausted his handbook
to the fox. Under the head Canidæ he
kindly tells us—Sub-Genus 3, Vulpes—the foxes
—that "the pupils of their eyes are elliptical,
or contractile into a vertical slit—tail long,
bushy—lower on the legs in proportion to the
body—fur finer—habit nocturnal."

And, wonderful to relate, I also find, under
the head "Important to Fox-hunters," the
following interesting bit of algebra:

{algebraic formula}

Which looks more like a calculation in arithmetical
cypher of the Professor's income than
anything else; but at last I get on dry ground
and read, as an alchemist's boy might read his
absent master's secret: "Muzzle elongated—
nostrils naked, binular, and open at the sides—
tongue soft—ears erect—feet anterior
pentadactylous, posterior tetradactylous, walk on the
toes—mammæ both pectoral and ventral." This
is, indeed, knowledge—something like
knowledge!

Why is not this printed in a cheap form,
placed between an orange-tawny cover,
illustrated with a Flying Dutchman fox-hunt, and
sold on railway stalls for the use of young
fox-lovers who run about England after a
bad smell when they might get it in full
perfection in the Thames without running at all?
What a fine sight it would be to see a band of
scarlet youths, while waiting at the covert side
some biting January morning, instead of idle
smoking, and scandal and gossip, improving their
minds by studying Professor Mole's (un)natural
History of the British Fox.

And fancy, too, in that golden age, when
all fancies become true, and all good men's
wishes are fulfilled, fancy the Professor roaming
about by moonlight with sanguinary Jem
the poacher, studying with the zeal of a
Columbus the natural history of the British
rabbit, or mounted on a thorough-bred, trying
to learn the habits and tempers of that
"noble quadruped" the horse. True, the
gallant Professor might catch cold sitting down
in the wet fern, and he might be pitched into
the thorn cage of a bullfinch. But what of that?
Has not science also its marytrs? Was there not
once a Park, once a Perouse, once a Cook? Why
should there not be a Mole?

"Now for your own history of the fox, the
rat, the dog, the badger, and all kinds of
creatures," says Mole, spitefully.

No, Professor, it does not follow that
because I see a shot-hole in the side of the vessel
of science that I am necessarily sea-carpenter
enough to at once plug it. I see the howling
barrenness of your book, but I can only hint at
the flowers that might turn it to a garden of
Eden. I have a few gamekeepers' notes
that I keep as proofs and evidence. More I
have had and lost; but still, what I have are
a good specimen of the vein I have struck.

It was only last week I was down in a Wiltshire
village; and, having studied the church—
where on Sundays you hear the blackbirds in the
rector's garden laurels making their blithe
responses between the pauses ot the psalms, and
where the arrow-fleet swallows zigzag in and
out the aisles between the lessons—and, having
watched the reapers, with their steel crescents,
busy in the gold rows of the sloping corn-fields,
and having read all the red and blue handbills on
the folding-doors of the only empty barn in the
place, I began to grow a little weary of lying
down in the clover-field and watching the bee
excisemen, so I determined to follow the dark
green line of path that led through the meadow,
where the young pheasants were dusting and
sunning themselves round their coops, and go
and have half an hour's quiet "crack " with old
Targett, the head-gamekeeper.

Off I went, rousing the dozing larks to
their chorister duties, whipping the purple
cushion heads off the thistles, and taking the
way to the hanging wood, in the heart of which
our Wiltshire Leatherstocking lives. I love
the deep greenness of the old plantations, where
the ferns are high enough for a stag to pass
under, without his antlers touching the key-stone
of the arch, and the honeysuckles wind so close
together that they seem like chains twined with
flowers. Here were glades, too, quite dry,
and coated with the red brown aromatic dead
needles of the fir; and, up in the tall beeches,
whose grey trunks threw quite a light around
me, I could see the bush of the squirrel's nest.

At last I got to the break looking down on
the stubble-field where the keeper's cottage was.
It was bosomed in woods, and down below, before
it, was a stile grown round with docks, and a
blue Gainsborough glimpse of a church tower
with the weathercock on it glittering like a