WEASEL AND RABBIT ! IDLER AND LABORER. 169 
A lean cat does not tread the eaves with a step more assured or 
quieter than the marten dog over joists, ladders, and projecting 
eaves. He has been seen to break with his head the pane of a 
dormer window, by crossing which he might gain a little ; climb 
chimneys like a trained sweep ; dart from beam to beam across 
the void with the readiness and the precise calculation of a squir- 
rel. A hunter, whom time had left more wit than hair, for whom 
I had procured the amusement of a beech-marten chase, remarked 
to me after it, The dog has not said his last word to man. I know 
it from my Castagno, this last word of the dog : Man is king of 
the earth ; the dog is his prime minister ! 
Among all these beasts of rapine the marten is the greatest in 
size as well as the most precious for its fur; it lives almost con- 
stantly on trees, where it is met with in the cavities of old oaks 
and in squirrel nests ; they make terrible havoc of young birds. 
The marten is distinguished from the beech marten by the color 
of his cravat. He wears this ornament of a greenish yellow ; the 
beech marten prefers white. The skunk is smaller than the two 
species which precede. 
The weasel and the ermine are diminutives of the beech marten 
— little creatures which have lost much of the fetid smell, but re- 
tained the sanguinary humor. We may meet every day in the 
fields and in warrens, bodies of rabbits whose autopsy shows that 
they have been bled in the jugular by able practitioners. These 
practitioners are weasels, a little larger than mice, and less strong 
than rats. How is it that the hare and rabbit, which are animals 
endowed with a jaw almost as powerful as that of the beaver, and 
whose formidable incisors would cut a weasel in two at one bite — 
how can the rabbit and hare resign their throats to so contempti- 
ble an enemy ? I will answ^er this question when you answer me 
another. 
How is it that the laborers, who are the only useful beings, who 
are the most numerous and the most devoted, who have on their 
side the right and muscular force, why have these laborers re- 
signed themselves to be exploited and assassinated, since the world 
began, by an imperceptible minority of idlers and vampires? The 
reason is that these reign by terror over timid and ignorant souls, 
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