Here and there in the midst of well-tilled acres are new farm-houses, built with the earnings of a lucky investment. One hears a great deal in cars and on way-side platforms of "September deliveries," options and soaring dividends, but very little of dividends that dwindle and collapse because mothers have borne patches instead of blacks, or borne none at all, or buried Class A litters that they feared to have confined in over-warm pens. On Cherry Island in Alberton harbour the pioneer fox farmer, Charles Dalton, laid out the ranch upon which all later fox studs were modelled. Not without tribulations did he found the new industry. "At first," he says, "I kept the animals in ordinary board sheds, connected by chutes. They used to lose their litters, owing to the disturbances usually associated with a barn-yard. The first year I kept them in a wire enclosure. I had no over-hang, and two foxes climbed out. At first I had only one strip of wire between each pen. The foxes used to get their legs through and kill each other. I stopped this by doubling the partitions. At first I kept two females in one pen. This resulted in jealousy and when the two had young in the same pen, they destroyed each other’s litters. Then, I had trouble with the water getting in their nests, and causing death to the pups." It was a rancher at the other end of the island who wakened one winter morning to find three full-grown foxes in a yard where there had been only
