The terrified Rufe, looking down upon his brother's blackened face and the bear's wicked claws waving above it, leaped to his feet and started to run to the barn-loft door, to scream for help.

At less than half the distance, his feet caught in the meshes of the unrolled net, and he measured his length on the floor.

As he quickly untangled a foot, the thought flashed into his mind, "Throw this net upon the bear's legs!" In a flash he was at the edge of the open floor and hauling the big seine in coils at his feet.

When he had a heap to the height of his knees he gathered it in his arms and dropped the coils upon Solomon's waving legs.

The bear's claws took instant hold of the stout meshes, and bruin, feeling his feet entangled, wrenched at their fastenings, rolling himself over on his side and off the body of the prostrate boy. Perry, well-nigh smothered, had barely strength enough to crawl out of reach of the whirlwind fight which now took place.

Even the cow was awed to silence by the uproar of Solomon's rage as he fought with the entangling folds of the salmon net.

The seine needed no attendance. It did its own work once the grizzly's legs had been thrust through its meshes.

Coil after coil, the hundred and fifty feet of seine came down out of the loft as the bear rolled and pitched and tumbled. The more he tore and threshed, the more meshes there were to enwrap and entangle him.

In five minutes from the time its first meshes dropped upon him, the net had Solomon so wound and bound that his legs were immovable, and he could barely wriggle his neck.

Perry soon recovered his breath, and before they ran to the field to tell of Solomon's plight, the two boys had the presence of mind to pen the cow up where she could not, should she take a notion, gore the helpless grizzly.

Amid both laughter and commiseration, blended with comments on the pluck of the two youngsters, the ranchmen performed a surgical operation on the helpless Solomon, extracting the spear from his flesh. With much greater difficulty they freed him from the seine and got him back into his lair.

A DROLL FOX-TRAP

By C. A. Stephens

When I was a boy I lived in one of those rustic neighborhoods on the outskirts of the great "Maine woods." Foxes were plenty, for about all those sunny pioneer clearings birch-partridges breed by thousands, as also field-mice and squirrels, making plenty of game for Reynard.

There were red foxes, "cross-grays," and "silver-grays;" even black foxes were reported. These animals were the pests of the farm-yards, and made havoc with the geese, cats, turkeys, and chickens. In the fall of the year, particularly after the frosts, the clearings were overrun by them night and morning. Their sharp, cur-like barks used often to rouse us, and of a dark evening we would hear them out in the fields, "mousing" around the stone-heaps, making a queer, squeaking sound like a mouse, to call the real mice out of their grass nests inside the stone-heaps. This, indeed, is a favorite trick of Reynard.