“A snare is something that looks like a creeper, but it doesn’t grow and it’s worse than all the hawks in the world,” said Molly, glancing at the now far-away red-tail, “for there it hides night and day in the runway till the chance to catch you comes.”

“I don’t believe it could catch me,” said Rag, with the pride of youth as he rose on his heels to rub his chin and whiskers high up on a smooth sapling.  Rag did not know he was doing this, but his mother saw and knew it was a sign, like the changing of a boy’s voice, that her little one was no longer a baby but would soon be a grown-up Cottontail.

V

There is magic in running water.  Who does not know it and feel it?  The railroad builder fearlessly throws his bank across the wide bog or lake, or the sea itself, but the tiniest rill of running water he treats with great respect, studies its wish and its way and gives it all it seems to ask.  The thirst-parched traveller in the poisonous alkali deserts holds back in deadly fear from the sedgy ponds till he finds one down whose centre is a thin, clear line, and a faint flow, the sign of running, living water, and joyfully he drinks.

There is magic in running water, no evil spell can cross it.  Tam O’Shanter proved its potency in time of sorest need.  The wild-wood creature with its deadly foe following tireless on the trail scent, realizes its nearing doom and feels an awful spell.  Its strength is spent, its every trick is tried in vain till the good Angel leads it to the water, the running, living water, and dashing in it follows the cooling stream, and then with force renewed takes to the woods again.

There is magic in running water.  The hounds come to the very spot and halt and cast about; and halt and cast in vain.  Their spell is broken by the merry stream, and the wild thing lives its life.

And this was one of the great secrets that Raggylug learned from his mother—­“after the Brierrose, the Water is your friend.”

One hot, muggy night in August, Molly led Rag through the woods.  The cotton-white cushion she wore under her tail twinkled ahead and was his guiding lantern, though it went out as soon as she stopped and sat on it.  After a few runs and stops to listen, they came to the edge of the pond.  The hylas in the trees above them were singing ‘sleep, sleep,’ and away out on a sunken log in the deep water, up to his chin in the cooling bath, a bloated bullfrog was singing the praises of a ‘jug o’ rum.’

“Follow me still,” said Molly, in rabbit, and ‘flop’ she went into the pond and struck out for the sunken log in the middle.  Rag flinched but plunged with a little ‘ouch,’ gasping and wobbling his nose very fast but still copying his mother.  The same movements as on land sent him through the water, and thus he found he could swim.  On he went till he reached the sunken log and scrambled up by his dripping mother on the high dry end, with a rushy screen around them and the Water that tells no tales.  After this in warm, black nights, when that old fox from Springfield came prowling through the Swamp, Rag would note the place of the bullfrog’s voice, for in case of direst need it might be a guide to safety.  And thenceforth the words of the song that the bullfrog sang were, ‘Come, come, in danger come.’