ter for winter drainage, dry and
overgrown with grass, formed a tunnel in the hedge-bank between the corn
and the root-crop field beyond; and through this gutter the leveret,
when at night she grew hungry, could steal into the dense tangle of
thistles and nettles fringing the turnips, thence, between the ridges
under the wide-spreading leaves, to the narrow pathway dividing the rape
from the root-crop, and across the field to a furrow where sweet red
carrots, topped with dew-sprinkled plumes, tempted her dainty appetite.

When the calm night was illumined, but not too brightly, by the moon and
stars, the leveret would venture far away from her retreat to visit a
cottage garden where the young lettuces were crisp and tender. Her
depredations among the carrots and lettuces were scarcely such as to
deserve punishment. She ate only enough of the lettuces to make a slight
difference in the number of seeding plants ultimately devoured by the
cottager's pig, or thrown to the refuse-heap; and from the great pile of
carrots, to be gathered and stored in the peat-mound by the farmstead,
the few she destroyed could never by any chance be missed. On all the
countryside she was the most inoffensive creature--the harmless gipsy of
the animal world, having no fixed abode, her tent-roof being the dome of
the sky.

As autumn advanced, the reapers came to the corn. She heard them enter
by the gate; and presently, along the broad path cut by the scythe
around the field, the great machine clanked and whirred. All day the
strange, disturbing noise continued, drawing gradually nearer the spot
where the leveret lay. Through the spaces between the stalks she watched
the whirling arms swinging over, and the horses plodding leisurely by
the edge of the standing wheat. At last, but almost too late, she
leaped from her "form" as the cruel teeth cut through the stalks at her
side; and, taking the direction of her "creep," rushed off towards the
nearest gap and disappeared over the brow of the hill.

In the middle of the night she wandered back to the wheat-field. The
scene before her eyes revealed a startling change. The corn stood in
"stooks" on the stubble; no winding paths led here and there through a
silent sanctuary, where countless waving, nodding plumes, bent and
released by a gentle-flowing wind, had shimmered in the bright radiance
of the harvest moon, when, coming home late at night from the marsh
across the hill, she had stayed for a w