operation on the helpless Solomon, extracting the spear from his
flesh. With much greater difficulty they freed him from the seine
and got him back into his lair.



A DROLL FOX-TRAP

By C. A. Stephens

When I was a boy I lived in one of those rustic neighborhoods on
the outskirts of the great "Maine woods." Foxes were plenty, for
about all those sunny pioneer clearings birch-partridges breed by
thousands, as also field-mice and squirrels, making plenty of game
for Reynard.

There were red foxes, "cross-grays," and "silver-grays;" even black
foxes were reported. These animals were the pests of the
farm-yards, and made havoc with the geese, cats, turkeys, and
chickens. In the fall of the year, particularly after the frosts,
the clearings were overrun by them night and morning. Their sharp,
cur-like barks used often to rouse us, and of a dark evening we
would hear them out in the fields, "mousing" around the
stone-heaps, making a queer, squeaking sound like a mouse, to call
the real mice out of their grass nests inside the stone-heaps.
This, indeed, is a favorite trick of Reynard.

At the time of my story, my friend Tom Edwards (ten years of age)
and myself were in the turkey business, equal partners. We owned a
flock of thirty-one turkeys. These roosted by night in a large