We have had a sad scene to-night. A chick has been ailing all day, and when we shut up the brood we found him dead in a corner.
Phœbe put him on the ground while she busied herself about the coop. The other chicks came out and walked about the dead one again and again, eyeing him curiously.
“Poor little chap!” said Phœbe. “’E’s never ’ad a mother! ’E was an incubytor chicken, and wherever I took ’im ’e was picked at. There was somethink wrong with ’im; ’e never was a fyvorite!”
I put the fluffy body into a hole in the turf, and strewed a handful of grass over him. “Sad little epitaph!” I thought. “He never was a fyvorite!”
CHAPTER VIII
July 13th.
I like to watch the Belgian hares eating their trifolium or pea-pods or grass; graceful, gentle things they are, crowding about Mr. Heaven, and standing prettily, not greedily, on their hind legs, to reach for the clover, their delicate nostrils and whiskers all a-quiver with excitement.
As I look out of my window in the dusk I can see one of the mothers galloping across the enclosure, the soft white lining of her tail acting as a beacon-light to the eight infant hares following her, a quaint procession of eight white spots in it glancing line. In the darkest night those baby creatures could follow their mother through grass or hedge or thicket, and she would need no warning note to show them where to flee in case of danger. “All you have to do is to follow the white night-light that I keep in the lining of my tail,” she says, when she is giving her first maternal lectures; and it seems a beneficent provision of Nature. To be sure, Mr. Heaven took his gun and went out to shoot wild rabbits to-day, and I noted that he marked them by those same self-betraying tails, as they scuttled toward their holes or leaped toward the protecting cover of the hedge; so it does not appear whether Nature is on the side of the farmer or the rabbit . . .
