214 NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE. 



the same means. At the age of about fifteen her litters began to 

 be reduced to four or five ; and such a litter she exhibited when 

 in her fatting-pen. She proved, when fat, good bacon, juicy, and 

 tender ; the rind, or sward, was remarkably thin. At a moderate 

 computation she was allowed to have been the fruitful parent of 

 three hundred pigs : a prodigious instance of fecundity in so large 

 a quadruped ! She was killed in spring 1775. 



I am, etc. 



LETTER XXXIV. 



SELBORNE, May gf/i, 1776. 

 " . . . admorunt ubera tigres." 



DEAR SIR, We have remarked in a former letter* how much 

 incongruous animals, in a lonely state, may be attached to each 

 other from a spirit of sociality ; in this it may not be amiss to 

 recount a different motive which has been known to create as 

 strange a fondness. 



My friend had a little helpless leveret brought to him, which 

 the servants fed with milk in a spoon, and about the same time 

 his cat kittened and the young were dispatched and buried. The 

 hare was soon lost, and supposed to be gone the way of most 

 fondlings, to be killed by some dog or cat. However, in about a 

 fortnight, as the master was sitting in his garden in the dusk of 

 the evening, he observed his cat, with tail erect, trotting towards 

 him, and calling with little short inward notes of complacency, 

 such as they use towards their kittens, and something gambling 

 after, which proved to be the leveret that the cat had supported 

 with her milk, and continued to support with great affection. 1 



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 Linnaeus calls it, should be 



* Letter XXIV. 



