be imagined. It is like the old chronicles of medieval Europe in
the days when there was a sort of ordered anarchy between feudal
lords and overlords, and burg-grafs, and mitred abbots, and prince-
bishops, robber barons and merchant guilds, and Electors and so
forth, all striving and contending and counter-plotting, and
interfering with each other under some vague code of loosely-
applied rules. Here one sees it reproduced under one's eyes, like
a musty page of black-letter come to life. Look at one little
section of it, the poultry-life on the farm. Villa poultry, dull
egg-machines, with records kept of how many ounces of food they
eat, and how many pennyworths of eggs they lay, give you no idea of
the wonder-life of these farm-birds; their feuds and jealousies,
and carefully maintained prerogatives, their unsparing tyrannies
and persecutions, their calculated courage and bravado or
sedulously hidden cowardice, it might all be some human chapter
from the annals of the old Rhineland or medieval Italy. And then,
outside their own bickering wars and hates, the grim enemies that
come up against them from the woodlands; the hawk that dashes among
the coops like a moss-trooper raiding the border, knowing well that
a charge of shot may tear him to bits at any moment. And the
stoat, a creeping slip of brown fur a few inches long, intently and
unstayably out for blood. And the hunger-taught master of craft,
the red fox, who has waited perhaps half the afternoon for his
chance while the fowls were dusting themselves under the hedge, and
just as they were turning supper-ward to the yard one has stopped a
moment to give her feathers a final shake and found death springing
upon her. Do you know," he continued, as Elaine fed herself and
the mare with morsels of currant-loaf, "I don't think any tragedy
in literature that I have ever come across impressed me so much as
the first one, that I spelled out slowly for myself in words of