LITTLE FOLKS THAT GNAW 193 



with ridiculous ease, and after seeing, of a morning, 

 the network of their tracks on the snow and the 

 freshly exposed wood of young pear- or apple-trees 

 where they had stood on their long hind legs and 

 eaten the bark. More than one person, that winter, 

 on a moonlight night, came upon little groups of 

 these hares dancing on their hind legs, and every 

 walk in the woods was almost sure to result in start- 

 ing one up from under a bush, where he slept till 

 late afternoon. Even when summer came, I often 

 saw their long brown ears sticking up in a young 

 corn-field, and more than once mistook these ears 

 for those of a fawn. 



It was my ambition during the following winter 

 to build some kind of a blind, by an open space 

 baited with apple twigs, where I could watch till I 

 had seen the hares dance, for during the first winter 

 of the invasion I didn't have the luck to witness this 

 interesting terpsichorean spectacle, and those who 

 did have the luck all testified it was both comical 

 and strange. But my blind was never built. The 

 hares, during the following winter (an exceptionally 

 mild one, too), practically disappeared from our 

 neighborhood. None of us has been able abso- 

 lutely to verify the cause, but this much is certain: 

 early in the winter a number of great horned owls 

 appeared — or, rather, became audible — on the 

 wooded eastern slopes of Mount Everett, at the base 

 of which my farm lies, and over which the rabbits 

 roamed, making their nightly sallies down to the 

 orchards. On calm evenings, no sooner had the 

 sun set than we would sometimes hear half a dozen 

 owls, along the shadowed slopes, hooting mourn- 



