like to watch the Belgian hares eating their trifolium or pea-pods or
grass; graceful, gentle things they are, crowding about Mr. Heaven, and
standing prettily, not greedily, on their hind legs, to reach for the
clover, their delicate nostrils and whiskers all a-quiver with
excitement.

As I look out of my window in the dusk I can see one of the mothers
galloping across the enclosure, the soft white lining of her tail acting
as a beacon-light to the eight infant hares following her, a quaint
procession of eight white spots in it glancing line. In the darkest
night those baby creatures could follow their mother through grass or
hedge or thicket, and she would need no warning note to show them where
to flee in case of danger. "All you have to do is to follow the white
night-light that I keep in the lining of my tail," she says, when she is
giving her first maternal lectures; and it seems a beneficent provision
of Nature. To be sure, Mr. Heaven took his gun and went out to shoot
wild rabbits to-day, and I noted that he marked them by those same self-
betraying tails, as they scuttled toward their holes or leaped toward the
protecting cover of the hedge; so it does not appear whether Nature is on
the side of the farmer or the rabbit . . .

{Mr. Heaven . . . went out to shoot wild rabbits: p59.jpg}

There is as much comedy and as much tragedy in poultry life as anywhere,
and already I see rifts within lutes. We have in a cage a French
gentleman partridge married to a Hungarian lady of defective sight. He
paces back and forth in the pen restlessly, anything but content with the
domestic fireside. One can see plainly that he is devoted to the
Boulevards, and that if left to his own inclinations he would never have
chosen any spouse but a thorough Parisienne.

The Hungarian lady is blind of one eye, from some stray shot, I suppose.
She is melancholy at all times, and occasionally goes so far as to beat
her head against the wire netting. If liberated, Mr. Heaven says that
her blindness would only expose her to death at the hands of the first
sportsman, and it always seems to me as if she knows this, and is ever
trying to decide whether a loveless marriage is any better than the tomb.

Then, again, the great, grey gander is, for some mysterious reason, out
of favour with the entire family. He is a noble and amiable bird, by far
the best all-round character in the flock, for dignity of mien and large-
minded common-sen