224 
MISCELLANEOUS NOTES AND OBSERVATIONS. 
them an old dog, the other two young ones. About noon, on 
Sunday, a fortnight ago, they all went out together, hut at two 
o’clock, when we have lunch, and when they all usually appear, only 
the old one was to he seen. Five o’clock came and still the same state 
of things continued, and on inquiry being made it was found that 
no one about the house had seen anything of the two missing dogs. 
At six, when it was quite dark, one of my sons proceeded to make 
a search, and, after being out a little while' in the old pleasure 
ground, he thought he heard a sound, which, had he not been on 
the look-out, he would not have noticed. Proceeding towards the 
place whence it seemed to come, he heard it again, and at length 
traced it to one of the old hollow oaks, and there, sure enough, the 
two dogs were imprisoned. It would appear that they had followed 
a rabbit through a hole in the bark, at the bottom of the tree, and 
had made their way up through a quantity of leaves and bits of 
branches which the jackdaws had brought to use in the making of 
their nests. The dogs scrambled up after their prey, which con¬ 
tinued to escape them, the accumulated rubbish blocked the hole at 
the bottom, and they were unable to get out again. An axe was 
procured, a hole sufficiently large was made, and the dogs, although 
not without some difficulty, were' got out of their prison. Now 
comes the most curious part of the story. Three days afterwards 
the two dogs again disappeared, and no tidings of them could be 
obtained; at last, one of the grooms, when taking the horses out 
for exercise, to his great surprise saw one of them sitting on the 
fork of a hollow oak tree, about twenty feet from the ground; he 
being the slimmer of the two had managed to get through a hole 
too small for the other, whose head was perceived peeping out 
of it. The second entrapment had come to pass just as on the 
previous occasion, and the dogs were eventually got down from 
their perilous position with the help of a ladder.— \_Lord~\ JEbury , 
Moor Park, 11 th Feb., 1887. 
