LXXIII. 'The Demon RahUr 



I AM almost convinced that there is, or was, 

 a demon rabbit in this neighbourhood. You 

 all know the stories that come from far coun- 

 tries about ghostly tigers and phantom lions 

 that seem to bear charmed lives, and to be invulner- 

 able to the bullets of the most skilled marksman. 

 According to the talented liars who tell the stories 

 they are the actual bodies of dead and gone lions 

 and tigers that "revisit the ghmpses of the moon" 

 to torment hunters. The rabbit I have been having 

 experiences with seems to be of this kind. He ap- 

 pears in the open with insulting indifference, and 

 so far we have no evidence that he has been seriously 

 injured by our attempts to get him. But before 

 proceeding with my story perhaps I had better say 

 a few words to put myself on the right side of the 

 law. I have a hazy recollection that the game laws 

 protect rabbits, but I make my appeal to an older 

 code which asserts that "self-protection is the first 

 law of Nature." I do not mean this in the sense 



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