and had caught scent of him. He
darted forwards to get into the drain, when the trap, which the bailiff
had so carefully removed from where Bevis had set it, snapped him up in
a second. The shock and the pain made him faint; he turned over and lay
still.

About the same time the moor-hen, borne swiftly along by the wind on her
way to the river, reached the hills, and seeing the hare, flew low down
and delivered the weasel's message as well as she could. The hare was
dreadfully alarmed about Sir Bevis, and anxious to relieve him from his
fright in the dark copse, raced down the hill, and over the fields as
fast as she could go, making towards that part of the copse where the
birches stood, as the weasel had directed, knowing that in running there
she would find her neck in a noose.

It happened just as he had foreseen. She came along as fast as the wind,
and could already see the copse like a thicker darkness before her, when
the loop of the wire drew up around her neck, and over she rolled in the
furrow.

Now the weasel had hoped that the wire would not hang her at once. He
intended to have come back from the farm, and from taunting the rat in
the trap, in time to put his teeth into her veins, before, in her
convulsive efforts to get free, she tightened the noose and died.

And this, too, happened exactly as the weasel had intended, but in a
different manner, and with a different result; for it had chanced that
the wind, in the course of its ravages among the trees, snapped off a
twig of ash, which rolling over and over before the blast along the
sward, came against the stick which upheld the wire, and the end of the
twig where it had broken from the tree lodged in the loop. Thus, when
Ulu kicked, and struggled, and screamed, in her fear, the noose indeed
drew up tight and half-strangled her, but not quite, because the little
piece of wood prevented it. But, exhausted with pain and terror, and
partially choked, the poor hare at last could do nothing else but crouch
down in the furrow, where the rain fell on and soaked her warm coat of
fur. For as the dawn came on the wind sank, and the rain fell.

In this unhappy plight she passed the rest of the night, dreading every
moment lest the fox should come along (as she could not run away), and
not less afraid of the daybreak, when some one would certainly find her.

After many weary hours, the bailiff coming to his work in the morning
with a sack over his shoulders to