hunt to find us.  That is the first thing I remember about my mother.  Afterwards she seemed sorry because she had hurt me, and nursed us all three, letting me have the most milk.  My mother always loved me the best of us, because I was such a fine leveret, with a pretty grey patch on my left ear.  Just as I had finished drinking another hare came who was my father.  He was very large, with a glossy coat and big shining eyes that always seemed to see everything, even when it was behind him.

He was frightened about something, and hustled my mother and us little ones out of the wheat-field into the big wood by which it is bordered.  As we left the field I saw two tall creatures that afterwards I came to know were men.  They were placing wire-netting round the field—­you see I understand now what all these things were, although of course I did not at the time.  The two ends of the wire netting had nearly come together.  There was only a little gap left through which we could run.  Another young hare, or it may have been a rabbit, had got entangled in it, and one of the men was beating it to death with a stick.  I remember that the sound of its screams made me feel cold down the back, for I had never heard anything like that before, and this was the first that I had seen of pain and death.

The other man saw us slipping through and ran at us with his stick.  My mother went first and escaped him.  Then came my sister, then I, then my brother.  My father was last of all.  The man hit with his stick and it came down thud along side of me, just touching my fur.  He hit again and broke the foreleg of my brother.  Still we all managed to get through into the wood, except my father who was behind.

“There’s the old buck!” cried one of the men (I understand what he said now, though at the time it meant nothing to me).  “Knock him on the head!”

So leaving us alone they ran at him.  But my father was much too quick for them.  He rushed back into the corn and afterwards joined us in the wood, for he had seen wire before and knew how to escape it.  Still he was terribly frightened and made us keep in the wood till the following evening, not even allowing my mother to go to her form in the rough pasture on its other side and lie up there.

Also we were in trouble because my brother’s forepaw was broken.  It gave him a great deal of pain, so that he could not rest or sleep.  After a while, however, it mended up in a fashion, but he was never able to run as fast as we could, nor did he grow so big.  In the end the mother fox killed him, as I shall tell.

My mother asked my father what the men with the sticks were doing—­for, you know, many animals can talk to each other in their own way, even if they are of different kinds.  He told her that they were protecting the wheat to prevent us from eating it, to which she answered angrily that hares must live somehow, especially when they had young ones to nurse.  My father replied that men did not seem to think so, and perhaps they had young ones also.  I see now that my father was a philosophic hare.  But are you tired of my story?