Kislingbury first shot a hare through one of its hind legs, and knocked him over, but he immediately straightened himself up and commenced to hop away, leaving the snow marked with his blood. He travelled so rapidly that the Lieutenant followed him for more than a mile before he was able to get another shot, when a ball was put through the hare's stomach; still it proceeded, losing here and there pieces of its entrails. For two miles further the animal was followed, when a third ball broke both fore paws just as the animal was in the act of jumping to reach a high rock. The force of the blow carried the animal over a cliff, where it rolled down a steep decline for nearly two hundred feet, and when picked up it still showed signs of life. It seemed to us to be a most astonishing example of tenacity on the part of any animal, much more of one usually thought to be timid and weak.
A. W. Greely.
[LITTLE SCARECROW.]
A SPANISH TRADITION.
Once upon a time there was a comely hen who lived comfortably in a farm-yard, surrounded by her numerous family of chickens, noticeable among which was a lame and deformed one. But this was precisely the one which the mother loved most dearly; for that is always the way with mothers. The lame chicken, that had been hatched from a very diminutive egg, was, in fact, only half a chicken, and to look at him one might have supposed that the sword of Solomon had executed on his person the famous sentence pronounced on a certain occasion by that wise King. He had only one eye, one wing, and one leg; yet for all that he put on more airs than his father, who was the handsomest, the most valiant, and the stateliest rooster in all the farm-yards for twenty leagues around. The chicken thought himself the Phœnix of his race. If the other young roosters made sport of him, he thought it was through envy, and if the young hens did so, that it was because he took so little notice of them.
One day he said to his mother: "Mother, I have something to say to you. The country bores me. I have made up my mind to go to the court; I want to see the King and the Queen."
The poor mother trembled when she heard these words. "Son," she exclaimed, "who can have put such nonsense in your head? Your father has never left his native place, and he is the honor of his race. Where will you find a yard like this? Where wholesomer or more abundant food, a hen-house so sheltered and so near the station, or affection like that of your family?"
"Nego," said Little Scarecrow in Latin, for he prided himself upon his learning, "my brothers and sisters and my cousins are nothing but a set of ignoramuses."
"But, my son," responded his mother, "have you never looked at yourself in the glass? Don't you see that you have only one foot and one eye?"