“Well,” he said, as Tommy Smith came up; “you see you cannot catch me.”
“No,” said Tommy Smith—he was getting quite accustomed to having talks with animals,—“you run too quickly.”
“For my part,” said the hare, “I wonder how any little boy who has a kind heart can like to tease and frighten a poor, timid animal who is persecuted in so many ways as I am.”
“What do you mean by ‘persecuted’?” said Tommy Smith. “That is a word which I don’t understand. It is too long for me.”
“It is a great pity,” the hare went on, “that a little boy should always be doing something which he does not know the word for. To ‘persecute’ people is to be very cruel to them, and whenever you hurt, or annoy, or frighten, or ill-treat any of us animals, then you are persecuting us.”
“If I had known that,” said Tommy Smith, “I would not have done it.”
“Then you mustn’t do it any more,” said the hare; “and especially not to me, because I have so many enemies who are always trying to injure me.”
“Why, what enemies have you?” said Tommy Smith.
“Plenty,” the hare said. “First, there is that wicked animal the fox, who is always ready to kill and eat me whenever he has the chance. He is very cunning, and, as he knows he cannot run fast enough to catch me, he tries all sorts of ways to pounce upon me when I am not expecting it. Sometimes he will wait by a hole in the hedge that he has seen me go through, and when I come to it again, he springs out and seizes me with his teeth and kills me, for he is much stronger than I am. Then sometimes one fox will chase me past a place where another fox is hiding, and then the fox that was hiding jumps out at me, and they both eat me together.”
“How wicked!” said Tommy Smith.