her faculties grew keener, the weariness and numbness of her spirit in large measure passed away.
Most of what little food she found was found at night. Small as the island was, it was considerably larger than its name implied and it supported a surprisingly numerous population of marsh rats whose shallow burrows still contained young. The fox, an old hand at digging out these burrows, subsisted largely on their inhabitants until she had depleted the supply. Occasionally she captured an adult rat by lying perfectly still, as though asleep, and crushing the animal with a sudden blow of her paw; and once in this same manner she had the good luck to kill a mink which was so much absorbed in following a trail that it failed to see her.
Insects grubbed out of the mold and little fiddler crabs captured along the muddy edges of the hummock helped to allay the cravings of her stomach. Some slight nourishment, too, was provided by long, slender green snakes and rather thick-bodied glass snakes, which had a queer habit of breaking themselves in two when her forepaw descended upon them. The supply of these was soon exhausted, however, and but for the coming of a series of abnormally high tides she must have starved before the arrival of the eagle and the heron which now shared her captivity on Half-Acre.
The marshes at that season abounded with clap-
