I wonder
what these rabbits are saying to each other. They seem very alert and
interested. Now a third appears on the scene. Two of them are
beginning to play, at least I thought so at first--and I feel in this
peaceful wood I should have left it at that, but having to recollect
the heading of these chapters I have to record the fact that they are
fighting. I never saw rabbits fight before, but they are fighting like
mad. I now see, in fact, the origin of the expression making "the fur
fly." The third is just skipping around watching intently with big
round eyes and its ears erect--perhaps the third is timekeeper, or
perhaps it is the story of the giants over again. The new-comer was
getting the best of it. I am sorry now that I could not resist the
temptation of taking a shot at them with my fountain pen. They fled
instantly. Perhaps the little rabbit lady is glad--she may be licking
the wounds of her Lancelot in their burrow a few yards away while he
is telling her that he would have beaten the other fellow all right in
the end if that darned fool hadn't thrown his fountain pen, while she
agrees, as she works her little rabbit tongue soothingly, although
privately she has her "doots."

How interesting it would be to be able to study the lives of all these
little people in this wood! There are terrible weasels here who wage a
sanguinary warfare against the rabbits--a guerilla war that no war
correspondent I know of has yet got his pass for. The seagulls are
beginning to talk now in a New York pitch of voice, and one can get an
occasional gleam of their wings through the blue-green pine branches.
I think it is their dinner-time when the tide goes out and spreads a
table-strip of slob for them on the shore.

How thankful we ought to be to have such dear stupid neighbours as the
English, who don't come in hordes of tourists to desecrate this
delightful land! Those who love it with intimacy of knowledge--this
wild coast with its rock fingers stretching into the Atlantic and
harbours around which the trees nestle for shelter from the winter
storms--the ruined castles with empty "magic casements, opening on the
foam of perilous seas, in fairy lands forlorn"--own it still for
their pleasure, moss-grown with history as vivid as the lichens on its
rocks or ruins.

Perhaps from a sense of justice, our neighbours think the invasion of
Cromwell's army was enough, and that we ought to be spared from
something worse, so that the