"I smell valerian," said I; on which they poked out their seven noses, and I ran at them with my spines, for a father who is not an Encyclopædia on all fours must adopt some method of checking the inquisitiveness of the young.
One more quotation must be made from the end of the story, where Father Hedgehog gives a list of the fates that befell his children:
Number one came to a sad end. What on the face of the wood made him think of pheasants' eggs I cannot conceive. I'm sure I never said anything about them! It was whilst he was scrambling along the edge of the covert, that he met the Fox, and very properly rolled himself into a ball. The Fox's nose was as long as his own, and he rolled my poor son over and over with it, till he rolled him into the stream. The young urchins swim like fishes, but just as he was scrambling to shore, the Fox caught him by the waistcoat and killed him. I do hate slyness!
It seems scarcely conceivable that any one can sympathize sufficiently with a Hedgehog as to place himself in the latter's position, and share its paternal anxieties,—but I think Julie was able to do so, or, at any rate, her translations of the Hedgepig's whines were so ben trovati, they may well stand until some better interpreter of the languages of the brute creation rises up amongst us. As another instance of her breadth of sympathy with beasts, let us turn to "A Week Spent in a Glass Pond" (which also came out in Aunt Judy's Magazine for 1876), and quote her summary of the Great Water-beetle's views on life:
After living as I can, in all three—water, dry land, and air,—I certainly prefer to be under water. Any one whose appetite is as keen, and whose hind-legs are as powerful as mine, will understand the delights of hunting, and being hunted, in a pond; where the light comes down in fitful rays and reflections through the water, and gleams among the hanging roots of the frog-bit, and the fading leaves of the water-starwort, through the maze of which, in and out, hither and thither, you pursue and are pursued, in cool and skilful chase, by a mixed company of your neighbours, who dart, and shoot, and dive, and come and go, and any one of whom, at any moment, may either eat you or be eaten by you. And if you want peace and quiet, where can one bury oneself so safely and completely as in the mud? A state of existence without mud at the bottom, must be a life without repose!
I must here venture to remark, that the chief and lasting value of whatever both my sister and my mother wrote about animals, or any other objects in Nature, lies in the fact that they invariably took the utmost pains to verify whatever statements they made relating to those objects. Spiritual Laws can only be drawn from the Natural World when they are based on Truth.
Julie spared no trouble in trying to ascertain whether Hedgehogs do or do not eat pheasants' eggs; she consulted The Field, and books on sport, and her sporting friends, and when she found it was a disputed point, she determined to give the Hedgepig the benefit of the doubt. Then the taste for valerian, and the fox's method of capture, were drawn from facts, and the gruesome details as to who ate who in the Glass Pond were equally well founded!
This (1876) volume of the Magazine is rich in contributions from Julie, the reason being that she was stronger in health whilst she lived at Aldershot than during any other period of her life. The sweet dry air of the "Highwayman's Heath"—bared though it was of heather!—suited her so well, she could sleep with her hut windows open, and go out into her garden at any hour of the evening without fear of harm. She liked to stroll out and listen to "Retreat" being sounded at sundown, especially when it was the turn of some regiment with pipes to perform the duty; they sounded so shrill and weird, coming from the distant hill through the growing darkness.
OUR LATEST PET—A REFUGEE PUP, WHOM WE HAVE SAVED FROM THE COMMON HANGMAN.