A Favourite Home Whenever you come upon remnants of this
marvellous dyke, or indeed of Offa's dyke, it is of particular beauty ; and the more of it that is preserved for the nation the better. The dip has defied the plough and native trees and bushes have grown up very much as they pleased ; and have given an attractive home to bird and beast. This new recreation ground held among other homes a fox's earth where you could watch the cubs at your leisure, till the given moment when some enemy placed steel-toothed traps in the mouth of the earth. I found one fox caught by the leg there and seldom had a more difficult job than releasing it. The slope was abrupt, the ground sticky, the spring of the trap very strong and the fox very fierce. When at. last I got my weight on to the spring, the fox slipped so quickly into the earth that I never knew how far the leg was injured. The earth was soon afterwards abandoned, though, I think, no more traps were set there. The same traps certainly were not.
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