The Evening Telegraph

Cunning of the Fox.

A hunter, who was one morning keeping watch in the forest, saw a fox cautiously making his approach toward the stump of an old tree. When sufficiently near, he took a high and determined jump on to the top of it, and, after looking around a while, hopped to the ground again. After Reynard had repeated this knightly exercise several times, he went his way, but presently returned to the spot, bearing a pretty heavy piece of dry oak in his mouth, and thus burdened, and as it would seem for the purpose of testing his vaulting powers, he renewed his leaps on to the stump. After a time, however, and when he found that, weighted as he was, he could make the ascent with facility, he desisted from further efforts, dropped the piece of wood from his mouth, and, coiling himself upon the top of the stump, remained motionless as if dead. At the approach of evening, an old sow and her progeny, five or six in number, issued from a neighboring thicket, and, pursuing their usual track, passed near to the stump in question. Two of her sucklings followed somewhat behind the rest, and just as they neared his ambush Michel, with the rapidity of thought, darted down from his perch upon one of them, and in the twinkling of an eye bore it in triumph on to the fastness he had so providentially prepared beforehand. Confounded at the shrieks of her offspring, the old sow returned in fury to the spot, and until late in the night made repeated desperate attempts to storm the murderer's stronghold; but the fox took the matter coolly, and devoured the pig under the very nose of its mother.-Naturalist in Norway.