The burrow was a wide and very steep one, and its sides were of extremely soft and loose sand. It was quite plain that Walnut, having once fallen in, could get no footing to jump or scramble out; indeed, so he told me in tones that shook with fatigue and fright.
I called up Sable at once, and she, clever creature that she is, suggested that the best thing to do was to throw down pieces of grass and stick in order to give Walnut a footing from which he might jump. It was a long operation, but we finished it at last, and our foolish son once more emerged to the light of day.
‘How, in the name of pine-cones, did you ever come to get into such a place?’ was my first angry question.
‘I saw something white sticking out of it, father,’ he replied very coolly, ‘and I wanted to find out what it was.’
I burst out laughing.
‘Haven’t you ever seen a rabbit’s scut before?’
Walnut looked rather foolish.
‘I suppose I have,’ he answered, ‘but it didn’t strike me at the time.’
Things went very quietly and peacefully during the early part of that summer. There were no human intruders whatever. As I found out afterwards, the new people at the Hall had stopped all the old footpaths, including the field-path which led to the coppice gate. They had great ideas on the subject of high-farming and high-preserving, but for the present we luckily lived in comparative ignorance of these. One or two things certainly seemed strange. Almost all the hedges in the neighbourhood had been cut down and pleached during the winter, making the country-side look singularly bare. Also several grass fields had been ploughed up and planted with roots or wheat.