Strange things sometimes occur during these hunts. I shall never forget how the rabbit once ran into my very arms. It happened along the river, or rather upon the small and clayey bank above it. Bashan was in full cry after his quarry and I was approaching the zone of the river-bank from the direction of the wood. I broke through the thistle stalks along the gravel slope and sprang down the grass-covered declivity on to the path at the very moment that the rabbit, with Bashan some fifteen paces behind him, was coming towards me in long bounds from the direction of the ferryman’s house, towards which I was turning. Bunny came running along the middle of the path straight towards me. . . . My first, hunter-like and hostile impulse was to take advantage of the situation and to bar his way, driving him, if possible, back into the jaws of his pursuer, who came on yelping in poignant joy. There I stood, as though rooted to the spot, and, slave that I was to the fever of the chase, I simply balanced the stick in my hand whilst the rabbit came nearer and nearer. I knew that a rabbit’s vision is very poor, that alone the sense of hearing and the sense of smell are able to convey warnings to him. He might therefore possibly mistake me for a tree as I stood there—it was my plan and my lively desire that he should do this, and so succumb to a fatal error, the consequences of which were not quite clear to me, but of which I nevertheless thought to make use. Whether the rabbit really made such an error during the course of his advance, is not quite clear. . . . I believe that he noticed me only at the very last moment, for what he did was so unexpected that all my schemes and deliberations were at once reduced to nothing, and a deep, sudden, and startling change took place in my state of mind.