cross
the dog's path.

"Bow-ow-ow," he fairly yelled as he bounded after Molly, but she kept
just beyond his reach and led him where the million daggers struck fast
and deep, till his tender ears were scratched raw, and guided him at
last plump into a hidden barbed-wire fence, where he got such a gashing
that he went homeward howling with pain. After making a short double,
a loop and a baulk in case the dog should come back, Molly returned to
find that Rag in his eagerness was standing bolt upright and craning his
neck to see the sport.

This disobedience made her so angry that she struck him with her hind
foot and knocked him over in the mud.

One day as they fed on the near clover field a red-tailed hawk came
swooping after them. Molly kicked up her hind legs to make fun of him
and skipped into the briers along one of their old pathways, where
of course the hawk could not follow. It was the main path from the
Creekside Thicket to the Stove-pipe brushpile. Several creepers had
grown across it, and Molly, keeping one eye on the hawk, set to work and
cut the creepers off. Rag watched her, then ran on ahead, and cut some
more that were across the path. "That's right," said Molly, "always keep
the runways clear, you will need them often enough. Not wide, but clear.
Cut everything like a creeper across them and some day you will find you
have cut a snare." "A what?" asked Rag, as he scratched his right ear
with his left hind foot.

"A snare is something that looks like a creeper, but it doesn't grow and
it's worse than all the hawks in the world," said Molly, glancing at the
now far-away red-tail, "for there it hides night and day in the runway
till the chance to catch you comes."

"I don't believe it could catch me," said Rag, with the pride of youth
as he rose on his heels to rub his chin and whiskers high up on a smooth
sapling. Rag did not know he was doing this, but his mother saw and knew
it was a sign, like the changing of a boy's voice, that her little one
was no longer a baby but would soon be a grown-up Cottontail.

V

There is magic in running water. Who does not know it and feel it? The
railroad builder fearlessly throws his bank across the wide bog or lake,
or the sea itself, but the tiniest nil of running water he treats with
great respect, studies its wish and its way and gives it all it seems to
ask. The thirst-parched traveller in the poisonous alkali deserts holds
back in deadly fear from the sedg