If his father had been a brown bear and his mother a badger, the result in outward appearance would have been Gulo, or something very much like him. But not all the crossing in the world could have accounted for his character; that came straight from the Devil, his master. Gulo, however, was not a cross. He was himself, Gulo, the wolverine, alias glutton, alias carcajou, alias quick-hatch, alias fjeldfras in the vernacular, or, officially, Gulo luscus . But, by whatever name you called him, he d

Blackie flung himself into the fight like a fiery fiend cut from coal. He did not know what the riot was about—and cared less. He only knew that the neutrality of his kingdom was broken. Some one was fighting over his borders; and when fighting once begins, you never know where it may end! (This is an axiom.) Therefore he set himself to stop it at once, lest worse should befall. He found two thrushes apparently in the worst stage of d.t.'s. One was on his back; the other was on the other's chest

A little past noon each day the sun covered a crack between two boards on the summer-house floor, and up through that aperture, for three days, had come a leggy, racy-looking, wolfish black spider. Each day, as it grew hotter, she extended her sphere of jerky investigation, vanishing down the crack again when the sun passed from it. To-day she prolonged her roamings right up the wall of the summer-house and along a joist bare of all save dust, and—well, the spider walked straight on, moving with

Sharp's the word with her.—SWIFT. Some people never know when they are well off. It is a complaint which afflicts cats, you may have noticed, and gets them into much trouble that their contemptuous temper might otherwise leave them free from. The silver tabby would have done better if she had remained asleep upon Miss Somebody's arm-chair, instead of squatting, still as marble, out in a damp field on a damp night, watching a rabbits' "stop"—which is vernacular for a bunnies' nursery—and thinking

Upon a day Hawkley came to the district, and took up his abode in a cottage of four rooms. He "did" for himself. Every housekeeper will know what "did" for himself means. But he did for himself in another way also. He came to read up for an exam. He told everybody this, which was one reason why he would be seen at ungodly hours, when no one was about, going to and from lonely spots, with a pair of blue glasses on his nose, a book under one arm, and a walking-stick with a silver band and a tassel

The lean night wind next evening came down, and day went out almost imperceptibly. Blackness grew under the furze caverns, and the last glimpse of the estuary faded away in a steely glimmer; a brown ghost of an owl slid low over the spiked ramparts, and wings—the wings of fighting wild-duck coming up from the sea to feed—"spoke" like swords through the star-spangled blue-black canopy of heaven. The night-folk began to move abroad. You could hear them pass—now a faint rustle here, now a surreptit

Long did the keepers, in Colonel Lymington's woods and along the hedges, search with dog and gun for Pharaoh, and many traps did they set. The dogs truly found a cat—two cats, and the guns stopped them, but one had a nice blue ribbon round his neck, and the other had kittens; the traps were found by one cat—and that was the pet of the colonel's lady—one stoat, one black "Pom"—and that was the idol of the parson's daughter—and one vixen—and she was buried secretly and at night—but Pharaoh remaine

It was gradually getting colder and colder as he flew, till at last, in a wonderful, luminous, clear, moonlit sunset, when day passed, lingering almost imperceptibly, into night, the wind fixed in the north, and a hard white frost shone on the glistening roofs—far, far below. Up there, at the three-thousand or four-thousand feet level, where he was flying, the air was as clear and sparkling as champagne, and as still as the tomb. If he had been passing over the moon instead of over the earth, th

Cob arrived in a snowstorm of unparalleled ferocity. He came upon extended vans sixty-nine inches from tip to tip, which he seemed as if he were never going to flap. All black above, all white below, he was. The fact was worth noting, because, as seen from below, he looked neither black nor any other hue, but just indiscriminate dark, unless he swerved against the little light, and then his white "hull" shone like silver. In his calm tacking, in his effortless play, in his superb mastery of the

No one would have thought of looking for any living beast in the raffle of dried twigs and tamarisk "leaves" between the crawling, snake-like roots of the feathery tamarisks if it had not been for the noise. The noise was unmistakable, as the noise of a fight always is; and the only other living thing near the spot, a tiny, tip-tailed, brown wren—a little ball of feathers, dainty as you please, and all alone there, and out of place down by the terrible, snow-covered, wind-tortured estuary shore—

She rolled over and regained her feet in a flash, to find herself facing a dark beast, with a huge, bushy, white tail, held up straight like a pleased cat's—but this was a sign of warning, not pleasure—that shone ghostily in the gloom of the mysterious, dread thorn-scrub. And the face of the beast was the face of a black and grinning devil, and its eyes shone red. She stood there, shivering a little, with the tiny young thing crawling weakly away from almost under her feet, and the long, vivid,

They found the king's son lying in a bed of reeds with his sister, the king's daughter, and although the prince and princess fought royally, as befitted their rank, they were smothered up roughly in sacks and carried speedily—the queen might return at any moment and want the captors—to the Governor of all the Provinces, and the Governor spake thus: "Oho! A royal pair, eh? They shall be sent to the capital, but first we must put them in an inclosure while we knock up some kind of a cage." And int

There was some sort of violent trouble going on down in the reeds beside the dike. The reed-buntings—some people might easily have mistaken them for sparrows, with their black heads and white mustaches—said so, swaying and balancing upon the bending reeds, and calling the makers of that trouble names in a harsh voice. And all the rest of the reed-people were saying so, too. It was an amazing thing how full of wild-folk that apparently deserted reed-patch was. Each bit of the landscape, each typi

There was a sun. You could not see it much because of burning, dancing haze, but you could not get anywhere without feeling it. Almost everything you touched—sand, rock, and such like—blistered you; and the vegetation, where it wasn't four-inch thorns and six-inch spikes and bloated cacti, was shriveled yellow-brown, like the color of a lion. Perhaps it was a lion, some of it. How could one tell? Lizards, which were bad; and scorpions, which were worse; and snakes, which were worse than worse, l

The sea-birds were very happy along that terrible breaker-hewn coast. Puffin, guillemot, black guillemot, razorbill, cormorant, shag, fulmar petrel, storm petrel perhaps, kittiwake-gull, common gull, eider-duck, oyster-catcher, after their kind, had the great, cliff-piled, inlet-studded, rock-dotted stretch of coast practically to themselves—to themselves in their thousands. Their only shadow was the herring-gulls, and the herring-gulls, being amateur, not professional, pirates, were too clumsy

And the Northern Lights come down         To dance on the houseless snow; And God, who clears the grounding berg,         And steers the grinding flow, He hears the cry of the little kit-fox         And the lemming on the snow.—RUDYARD KIPLING. A snipe rose suddenly, and began to call out; a capercailzie lofted all at once, with a great rush of winged bulk, above the snow-bound forest; and a white hare slid, like a wraith of the winter, down a silent forest aisle. Then came the White Wolf of the

We are the little folks—we! Too little to love or to hate.—RUDYABD KIPLING. No one ever accused him of not being all there. The job was to see what was there. A tiny alderman of the red bank-vole people, whose tunnels marched with the road through the wood, taking the afternoon sun—a slanting copper net, it was—at his own front-door under the root of the Scots fir, was aware of a flicker at a hole's mouth. He looked again, and saw the mouth of that hole was empty. He blinked his star-bright eyes

He makes a solitude, and calls it—peace.—BYRON. He comes, the false disturber of my quiet. Now, vengeance, do thy worst.—SHERIDAN. The rising sun came striding over the edge of the world, and presented the mountain with a golden crown; later it turned the rolling, heaving mystery of the mists below into a sea of pure amber. A tiny falcon—a merlin—shot up out of the mist, hung for a moment, whilst the sun transformed his wings to purple bronze, and fell again, vanishing instantly. Next, a cock-gr

Between the clumps of the stunted acacias the sun beat down with the pitilessness of a battleship's furnace, and it was not much better in the acacias themselves. Save for a lizard here and there, motionless as a bronze fibula, or a snake asleep with eyes wide open, or the flash of a "pinging" fly, all Nature seemed to have fled from that intolerable white-hot glare and gone to sleep. But the hour of emancipation was at hand, and the dim caverns of shade—what there was of it—stirred strangely. A

Now, if you wore a helmet and neck armor of purple, green, and blue in metallic reflections, with scarlet cheek and eye pieces, if your uniform were of purple, brown, yellow, orange-red, green, and black, "either positive or reflected," with a long, rakish, dashing rapier-scabbard cocked jauntily out behind, wouldn't you feel proud? So did he; pride and the "grand air" were written all over him. True, though, the rapier-scabbard was not a rapier-scabbard exactly—only a tail; but it looked like o