together. Jocko getta da cent from da audience, bringa him to me. Smarta da monk—weara da asbestos glove, taka da warm cent also. Jocko run away? Nevaire! Jocko haf been stole!”
After long consideration, I thought so, too. I knew very well that if any human being had stolen the Monkey, he would have been returned long before this. My memory of the animal was that he was rather troublesome, but of course I did not wish to say so, for fear of hurting my Uncle’s feelings. Eliminating the human element from the proposition, there remained only one possible conclusion. Some animal had done it, in response to that merciless law of the wilderness, which bids the wood people seek and slay and devour; the law of claw and tooth and fang, from which there is no appeal.
Jocko had not been taken from his high perch—this left tramps and neighbours out of the question, also Coons and Owls. He had not been left partly eaten, so that Weasels, Pole-Cats, or Minks were not responsible. What animal could have taken Jocko away bodily? My quick, active mind immediately answered: “A Fox!”
I said nothing to Uncle Antonio of my suspicion. In the morning, when I went down to the lake for my bath, I found a foxglove which surely had not been there the night before. It was a mother, then, foraging for her young. I wondered how they liked Jocko. He was so disagreeable to me, personally, that he would certainly have disagreed with me, even if I had eaten him.
The next day, my suspicions were confirmed in an unexpected manner. The ivy which grew around my door was pulled down and badly trampled upon. I remembered the old saying, then: “Little foxes spoil the vines.” The mother, growing bolder, must have brought her young into my dooryard.
When you are troubled by a mother Fox, you may know that her den is far away. She never draws attention to herself in her own neighbourhood. When you are not troubled by a mother Fox, you may know that one is near at hand. This great truth is familiar to every Little Brother of the Woods.
One bright afternoon, later in the week, I took my field-glass and went to a lofty hill nearby. I climbed to the summit and from that point of vantage surveyed the surrounding country, looking for the den. I found it, at last, under an overhanging rock, far to the south. The mother Fox sat in the doorway with her sewing, making another glove, doubtless, to replace the one she had so strangely lost, while her little ones gambolled about her. I never saw more than three at any one time, and so I concluded that there were only three in the family.
I felt wicked, spying upon this charming domestic picture, even though it was through my field-glass and I was so far away that they would never know they were observed. Here I was proved wrong, however. The weary 

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