36 THE MAGPIES PUZZLED 



some briers he stopped to nibble the shoots, for 

 he was very hungry. He would have stayed 

 longer than he did had not the rosy foreglow in 

 the sky warned him to be off. So again he 

 took to the trail and hurried along at his best 

 pace, scaring the boy at Brea Farm, who took 

 him for a pixie, as he whisked past the gap on 

 his way to the Fairies' Green, where for an hour 

 or more his mother and sister had been sitting in 

 their forms. The magpies saw him coming, but 

 chattered no reproach to the belated creature ; 

 though to a fox cub they would have shown no 

 mercy. After he had made his toilet, enjoying 

 the taste of the salt water, he sat moving his 

 jaws as if he were chewing the cud. He 

 was really crushing some grains of sand, of 

 which he had picked up a mouthful on the beach, 

 and the curious noise completely puzzled the 

 magpies, who tried in vain to locate it. The 

 dew was being fast dried up by the sun before 

 it ceased : then the slow regular rise and fall 

 of his flank told he was asleep. 



That night the hare took the jack and his 

 sister a way they had not been before. It led 

 over Caer Bran to Boswarthen, where all three 

 gambolled like mad things in the corn before 

 going down the hill to Tregonebris. There, 

 after feasting on the pinks in which the farmer's 



