OF SELBORNE 209^* 



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 dis- 

 patched 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 fort- 

 night, 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 gamboling 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 I 



Why so cruel and sanguinary a beast as a cat, of the 

 ferocious genus of Feles, the murium leo, as Linnaeus 

 calls it, should be affected with any tenderness 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 ; and by the 

 complacency and ease she derived to herself from the 

 procuring her teats to be drawn, which were too much 

 distended with milk, till, from habit, she became as 

 much delighted with this foundling as if it had been her 

 real offspring. 



This incident is no bad solution of that strange cir- 

 cumstance 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 marvellous that Romulus 

 and Remus, in their infant state, should be nursed 

 by a she-wolf, than that a poor little sucking 



