OF SELBORNE. 241 
were despatched and buried. The hare was soon 
lost, and supposed to be gone the way of most 
foundlings, to be killed by some dog or cat. How. 
ever, in about a fortnight, as the master was sitting 
in his garden in the dusk of evening, he observed 
his cat, with tail erect, trotting towards him, and 
calling with little, short, inward notes of compla- 
cency, such as they use towards their kittens, and 
something gambolling after, which proved to be the 
leveret that the cat had supported with her milk, 
and continued to support with great affection. 
Thus was a graminivorous animal nurtured by a 
carnivorous and predaceous one ! 
Why so cruel and sanguinary a beast as a cat, 
of the ferocious genus of felis, the murium leo, as 
Linnzeus calls it, should be affected with any ten- 
derness towards an animal which is its natural prey, 
is not so easy to determine. 
This strange affection probably was occasioned 
by that desiderium, those tender maternal feelings, 
which the loss of her kittens had awakened in her 
breast, till, from habit, she became as much de- 
lighted with this foundling as if it had been her real 
offspring. 
This incident is no bad solution of that strange 
circumstance which grave historians, as well as the 
poets, assert, of exposed children being sometimes 
nurtured by female wild beasts that probably had 
lost their young. For it is not one whit more mar. 
vellous that Romulus and Remus, in their infant 
state, should be nursed by a she-wolf, than that a 
poor little suckling leveret should be fostered and 
cherished by a bloody,grimalkin.* 
* We have also the following a by Mr White in his Ob- 
