lso, they
all, except the little warblers, who were safe, more or less, and
stayed to blaspheme the public nuisance, instantly and at the same
moment remembered appointments elsewhere, and went to keep them with a
haste that was noticeable and wonderful.

There before them was a hare. But a hare is a gentle and altogether
negligible wild-person. This hare, however, was fighting, and fighting
like several furies, and grunting, and making all sorts of unharelike
motions and commotions against another beast; and that other beast was
most emphatically not a hare.

It--or, rather, he--was big, as we count bigness among four-footed
wild-folk in Britain to-day. Probably he could stretch the tape to
twenty-three inches, of which about sixteen consisted of very long, low
body, with sturdy, bear-like, dumpy legs, the rest being rather thick,
furry tail; and, though nobody--without steel armor--might have cared
to take on the job of weighing him alive, he would have turned the
scale at about two pounds eight ounces, or perhaps a bit more. Not a
big beast, you will say; but in the wild he ruled big, being snaky and
of a fighting turn, so to say. He was, in fact, the very devil, and he
looked it--hard as nickel-steel. A dull, tawny devil, with a peculiar
purplish sheen in some lights--due to the longer hair--on his short,
hard coat, turning black on his throat, legs, and tail--as if he had
walked in black somewhere--and finished off with patches of creamy
white on head and ears. There was an extraordinary air of hard, tough,
cool, cruel, fighting-power and slow ferocity about the beast--a very
natural born gladiator of the wild places.

Men called him polecat, apropos of nothing about him, apparently, for
he had no connection with poles or cats; or foumart, apropos--and you
wouldn't have needed to be told if you had got to leeward of him just
then--of his _very_ unroselike smell--that is, fou--foul, mart--marten,
his nearest relation; or, again, fitchett, as our forefathers termed
him.

But never mind. What's in a name, anyway? A big sloe-hare, with a
leveret or two _not_ for sale--and that doe's leverets must have been
in the rushes somewhere--may, upon occasion, show unexpected
fighting-powers. And this one did. The polecat was kicked in the
stomach, and kicked and scratched in the ribs, and thumped on the nose,
and kicked and scratched and thumped on the head, before he could get
in the death-stroke, the terrible