“In plain sight of the whole school, punished him severely with a lady’s slipper.”
Under Jenny’s careful tuition, all these little Rabbits learned things that their own parents would never have had time to teach them. Children are born so fast in Rabbit families that there is never an opportunity for any one set of children to learn more than the merest rudiments of education, and this school of Jenny’s was like a University Extension Centre in an Esquimaux village. My cabin became a general meeting place for the Rabbits of the neighbourhood, and at length they got to be rather of a nuisance. Uncle Antonio had taken my only pillow with him for Jocko to sleep on—dear Uncle was always so considerate of animals!—and I was forced to make a pair of overalls do duty instead. I used to roll these up at night, with a stray feather or two in the pockets, and put my weary head down over all. Usually, I knew nothing more until morning, when Jenny and Chee-Wee would come and pat my face with their soft, velvety paws, and tell me it was time to get breakfast, and, please, could we have breakfast food this morning?
I used to explain to them that anything that was eaten in the morning was breakfast food, but they were as keen for good cereals as the editor of a popular magazine.
One night my overalls were stolen, so gently that I did not know it. I looked all over the premises for them and could not find them. Jenny seemed troubled also, and after breakfast she and Chee-Wee went out to look for them.
In about an hour, they returned, Jenny with the trouser legs in her mouth and Chee-Wee bringing up the rear. I should never have known them for mine, had not the autograph of the laundry marker been travelling with the band. They were torn, and had as many small holes in them as a fly screen. I was angry and was about to wage a war of extermination on the entire Rabbit tribe, but Jenny pleaded with me so effectively that I refrained. A Rabbit is very cunning when he sits up on his hind legs, with his paws folded, and looks at you eagerly with his bright eyes.
These are all minor details, however, and have been commonly observed by others. The only discovery of real importance which I made that Summer was in relation to the Rabbit method of communicating with each other. Fellow-Unnaturalists have written of the thumping, the whisker touching, and so-on. Some have even attempted to tabulate the thump code, but with only partial success.
My discovery is entirely new and has never appeared in any book before. Briefly it is this. Rabbits converse with each other by means of a deaf-and-dumb alphabet, very similar to that made by mutes of our own species, using their ears entirely.
I have not space here to elaborate upon it, nor to explain how I happened to discover it, but the entire subject will be found in a monograph which will be published in pamphlet form as soon as my paper on The Rabbit Grammar has been read before the International Society of Registered Unnaturalists.
Jenny was very clever at making me understand her, even without resorting to her own language. For instance, one day I had given her a handful of salt, in response to unmistakable signs and gestures on her part. She tasted of it, sniffed, then sat down upon it and began to sway from side to side. I understood then that she preferred rock salt and immediately gave it to her, but was it not clever? Could a human being, without the power of speech, have done more?
Among themselves, the talk of the Rabbits was astonishingly easy and informal. After I learned their language, by watching Jenny, Chee-Wee, and the friends who used to call upon them, I heard, or rather saw, many amusing things. All unconscious of my familiarity with their speech, they used to discuss me in my own presence.