140 TEN YEARS OF GAME-KEEPING 
seemed to prove that rabbit fertilizer was better than 
none at all. 
Rabbit-snarers often will complain that someone 
steals their rabbits because the string securing the 
snare to the peg apparently has been cut. I do not 
say people will not take rabbits, and sometimes the 
snares in ‘which they are caught as well. But a 
rabbit can cut a string with its teeth as cleanly as a 
man can do it with a knife. Once when I was 
ferreting in a dell a rabbit came up to a net, nipped 
a mesh, and hopped through the aperture, within a 
yard of my face. Occasionally I have had a fine 
dig when a rabbit has cut the line on a ferret. One 
rabbit cut a new line three times, as fast as I sent in 
a fresh ferret. Curiously enough, this happened in 
the same burrow of the dell where the rabbit had 
nipped the mesh of the net and escaped. We always 
suspected the same rabbit of all the cutting. 
Once or twice I have trapped hares at the mouth 
of a rabbit-hole, to which I concluded they must 
have gone in search of a sheltered seat. I know of 
one instance only in which a hare has gone right 
down a rabbit’s burrow. I was with a shooting- 
party walking some sainfoin for partridges, when a 
leveret about two-thirds grown jumped up, and 
offered a gun an easy crossing shot; but as the 
range was not more than twenty yards, there was no 
hurry. However, just as the trigger was pulled the 
hare disappeared as if swallowed by the earth, and 
