HARES AND RABBITS 137 
beginning to grow luxuriantly, one always can ask 
in what way that does harm. While he is trying 
to think of a convincing answer, remind him of the 
time when farmers gloried in their wheat, and did 
everything for the good of the great crops they 
grew, not only sowing it in clean land and hoeing 
it, but folding sheep over it in the spring, to eat the 
green tops and tread the roots firmly in the soil. 
Now, considering that a hare at its worst does no 
more than eat about half the length of each green 
blade of wheat which it selects, the result, far from 
being damaging, must tend to improvement. I 
won a great victory over a lord high bailiff of an 
estate, on which I began to get up the stock of 
hares. He had several fields of wheat which 
promised very fairly. But so soon as the ears grew 
heavy with corn, just before ripening, about one in 
three of the stems fell down. This I observed. 
The bailiff met me; he was genuinely furious, and 
told me that he had got judgment against the hares. 
I thought this was all very fine, and tried to reason 
with the man, but he would not. So I determined 
to play him at his own game. I appealed to Cesar, 
and found things as the bailiff had told me. I 
pointed out that the hares certainly had made a few 
roads through the wheat, but that even the bailiff 
had made no complaint as to what they had eaten. 
And was it possible, I asked, for anyone who 
thought for one moment to believe that hares could 
