tant. Occasionally men name a wild beast
correctly, and this little beast could only have one name--hedgehog: It
was obvious on the face of it.

But the cat, being a cat and an aristocrat, knew, as has been said,
nothing about pigs, real or only so called. She had killed a shrew
once, and spat it out for tasting abominably and smelling worse; and
shrews are cousins of the hedgehogs, of the same great clan,
Insectivora--far removed from the pigs, really--and that is the nearest
she had got.

She had never heard of hedgehogs, and never, never met a beast that
walked through the wild as if he owned it. And, more, he expected her
to get out of his way, which she did with feline and concentrated
remarks; and he--by the whiskers and talons!--the fool exposed his
back--turned his back openly, a thing no wild beast in its senses would
do, unless running away. And that, for a cat who had waited close on
two hours for baby business that didn't turn up, had got most
unfashionably drenched, and had, moreover, in her time, tackled more
than one grown-up rabbit, which was considerably larger than any
hedgehog--that, I say, was, for the silver tabby, too much.

She sprang. Rather, she executed two bounds, and somewhat unexpectedly
found herself on top of the hedgehog. I say "unexpectedly," because
she had hitherto bounded upon wild-folk who contrived mostly not to be
there. This one contrived nothing, except to stop still. And the cat
executed a third bound--_off_ the hedgehog, and rather more violently
and more quickly than the first two. Also, she spat.

When she had got over the intense pain--and cats feel pain badly--of
sharp spines digging into her soft and tender forefoot-pads, she
stopped, about two yards away, and glared at the hedgehog as if he had
played off a foul upon her, and she was surprised to see that he was no
longer egg-shaped, but rolled up into himself like a ball, so to speak,
and utterly quiescent. (I wonder if she remembered the little
wood-lice that she had so often amused herself playing with in idle
hours. They rolled themselves up just like that. Perhaps she thought
she'd come upon the Colossus of all the wood-lice.) Anyway, after she
had spat off at him all the vile remarks she could think of for the
moment, without producing any more reply than she would get from the
average stone, she came back, drawn with curiosity as by strings.

The hedgehog did not move; there was no need. It was f