“You’ll have some to answer for, John, according to your own story,” said Mrs. Wood.

“I have suffered already,” he said.  “Many a night I’ve lain on my bed and groaned, when I thought of needless cruelties I’d put upon animals when I was a young, unthinking boy—­and I was pretty carefully brought up, too, according to our light in those days.  I often think that if I was cruel, with all the instruction I had to be merciful, what can be expected of the children that get no good teaching at all when they’re young.”

“Tell us some more about the foxes, Mr. Wood,” said Mr. Maxwell.

“Well, we used to have rare sport hunting them with fox-hounds.  I’d often go off for the day with my hounds.  Sometimes in the early morning they’d find a track in the snow.  The leader for scent would go back and forth, to find out which way the fox was going.  I can see him now.  All the time that he ran, now one way and now another on the track of the fox, he was silent, but kept his tail aloft, wagging it as a signal to the hounds behind.  He was leader in scent, but he did not like bloody, dangerous fights.  By-and-by, he would decide which way the fox had gone.  Then his tail, still kept high in the air, would wag more violently.  The rest followed him in single file, going pretty slow, so as to enable us to keep up to them.  By-and-by, they would come to a place where the fox was sleeping for the day.  As soon as he was disturbed he would leave his bed under some thick fir or spruce branches near the ground.  This flung his fresh scent into the air.  As soon as the hounds sniffed it, they gave tongue in good earnest.  It was a mixed, deep baying, that made the blood quicken in my veins.  While in the excitement of his first fright, the fox would run fast for a mile or two, till he found it an easy matter to keep out of the way of the hounds.  Then he, cunning creature, would begin to bother them.  He would mount to the top pole of the worm fence dividing the fields from the woods.  He could trot along here quite a distance and then make a long jump into the woods.  The hounds would come up, but could not walk the fence, and they would have difficulty in finding where the fox had left it.  Then we saw generalship.  The hounds scattered in all directions, and made long detours into the woods and fields.  As soon as the track was lost, they ceased to bay, but the instant a hound found it again, he bayed to give the signal to the others.  All would hurry to the spot, and off they would go baying as they went.

“Then Mr. Fox would try a new trick.  He would climb a leaning tree, and then jump to the ground.  This trick would soon be found out.  Then he’d try another.  He would make a circle of a quarter of a mile in circumference.  By making a loop in his course, he would come in behind the hounds, and puzzle them between the scent of his first and following tracks.  If the snow was deep, the hounds had made a good track for him.  Over this he could