204 
PASSIONAL ZOOLOGY. 
place running up armed with sickles and forks, swearing, storm- 
ing, and stopping the dogs, and myself forced to an unreasonably 
large capitulation in specie in order to extricate them. It was 
not I who paid for the broken dahlias the second time, but a 
young friend who did not believe in the perfidies of the hare, and 
who required a lesson. I took great care to present the hare of 
the tree as a chance meeting, not as a last week^s acquaintance. 
The African hare, which 1 have hunted much, and which in- 
habits a country of barbarians, where the soil is not appropriated ; 
that is to say, where the right of property does not exist, the Af- 
rican hare has none of those tricks which smell of the Norman : 
he is a rabbit for his innocence. 
The civilized hare knows also, on the end of his nails, the flora 
and the geology of the district which it inhabits, and what strong 
herb burns the nose of the dogs, and what soils least preserve the 
track. He draws an immense profit from these studies. It is 
also certain that hares communicate to each other the different 
notions which they have acquired, as dp those old wolves who 
teach their cubs how dangerous it is to trifle with fire-arms. 
I have seen during one month, ten hares of the same district re- 
sort to the same stratagem ; and this was no classic method in use 
by all the hares of polished education in France and Navarre. 
The stratagem was local, and required a complete acquaintance 
with the condition of the places. It was a narrow bed of white 
clay, the only one which existed in the country, and which had to 
be gained across a thousand obstacles at the foot of a rapid as- 
cent, sometimes a league from the place it was started. Then the 
beast climbed to the summit of the poisoned zone, multiplying in 
its rapid ascent bounds and side-leaps to conceal its path ; come 
at last to the top of the hill, where there was an old marl-pit, 
hung round below with tufts of junipers ; it adjusted the bushes 
to conceal its passage, and from the height of the vertical wall, 
sprang desperate, headlong to the bottom of the pit. 
The trick was so well known that we habitually assigned the 
post of the marl-pit to the novices of our party — to collegians in 
vacations, who made their first hunting campaigns with us. 
Have they failed us ! But at least they have given me the occa- 
