her little one beneath an impenetrable
tangle of friendly thorns, while the baffled peregrine proceeded on his
way.

For some weeks, the hare languished under the effects of the falcon's
blow. When her leveret was old enough to find food for itself, she
rested, forced by the wound to live quietly in hiding, till the scar
healed and life once more became enjoyable. But she always bore the
marks of the talons, and so was spoken of by the country folk as "the
slit-eared hare."

The superstitious recalled the tales of a bygone century, and half
believed the hare to be a witch in disguise, for she seemed to bear a
charmed life, and, though known everywhere in the parish, successfully
eluded to the end all the devices that threatened her. No matter how
artfully the wire noose was set above the level of the ground in her
"run," she brushed it by and never blundered into the treacherous loop.
A net failed even to alarm her: it might almost be imagined that she
became an experienced judge of any such contrivance, and knew every
individual poacher by the method with which his toils were spread across
her path.

Not having bred during the year in which she was born, Puss had thrived,
and weighed about nine pounds in the late autumn of her second season.
But according to popular opinion she was much heavier. Will, the
cobbler, who was fond of coursing, stoutly maintained, to a group of
interested listeners in the bar-parlour of the village inn, that she
seemed like a donkey when she escaped from his greyhound into the wood.

Family cares again claimed the hare's attention in July; and, having
taken to heart her experience with the peregrine, she left the uplands
and made her home in the thickets of a river-island. At that time the
river was low, and, on one side of the island, the bed of the stream had
become a dry, pebbly hollow, save for a large pool fed by the backwater
at the lower end, where the minnows played, and whither the big trout
wandered from the rapids to feed during the hot summer nights.

Late one afternoon, when long shadows lay across the mossy bank of the
river beyond the tall beeches standing at the entrance to the island
thickets, Puss was waiting for the dusk, and dozing meanwhile, but with
wide-open eyes, beside her leveret. Since there was another little mouth
besides her own requiring food, she generally felt hungry long before
nightfall, and so, when the afterglow began to fade in the west, was
wont