Then he lifted the gun.  There was a most dreadful noise and the fox rolled over and lay still.

“There you are, all neat and tidy, my dear,” said the keeper.  “Now I must just tuck you away in the hollow tree before old Grampus sneaks round and sees you, for if he should it will be almost as much as my place is worth.”

Next he set his foot on the trap and, opening it, took hold of the fox by the fore-legs to carry it off.  The cat and the owl he stuffed away into a great pocket in his coat.

“Jemima! don’t you wholly stink,” he said, then gave a most awful yell.

The fox wasn’t quite dead after all, it was only shamming dead.  At any rate it got Giles’ hand in its mouth and made its teeth meet through the flesh.

Now the keeper began to jump about just as the fox had done when it set its paw in the trap, shouting and saying all sorts of things that somehow I don’t think I ought to repeat here.  Round and round he went with the fox hanging to his hand, like hares do when they dance together, for he couldn’t get it off anyhow.  At last he tumbled down into a pool of mud and water, and when he got up again all wet through I saw that the fox was really dead.  But it had died biting, and now I know that this pleased it very much.

It was just then that the man whom the keeper had called Grampus came up.  He was a big, fat man with a very red face, who made a kind of blowing noise when he walked fast.  I know now that he was the lord of all the other men about that place, that he lived in the house which looked over the sea, and that the boy and girl who put me in with the yellow-toothed rabbit were his children.  He was what the farmers called “a first-rate all-round sportsman,” which means, my friend—­but what is your name?

“Oh!  Mahatma,” I answered at hazard.

“Which means, my friend Mahatma, that he spent most of the year in killing the lower animals such as me.  Yes, he spent quite eight months out of the twelve in killing us one way and another, for when there was no more killing to be done in his own country, he would travel to others and kill there.  He would even kill pigeons from a trap, or young rooks just out of their nests, or rats in a stack, or sparrows among ivy, rather than not kill anything.  I’ve heard Giles say so to the under-keeper and call him ‘a regular slaughterer’ and ’a true-blood Englishman.’

“Yet, my friend Mahatma, I say in the light of the truth which has come to me, that according to his knowledge Grampus was a good man.  Thus, what little time he had to spare from sport he passed in helping his brother men by sending them to prison.  Although of course he never worked or earned anything, he was very rich, because money flowed to him from other people who had been very rich, but who at last were forced to travel this Road and could not bring it with them.  If they could have brought it, I am sure that Grampus would never have got any.  However, he did get it, and he aided a great many people with that part of it which he found he could not spend upon himself.  He was a very good man, only he liked killing us lower creatures, whom he bred up with his money to be killed.