From the first moment the rabbit saw him, he loaded him with polite attentions, declared he loved him already, and offered him the hospitality of his house; so the two of them jogged off in company. But after a moment or two Goodman Rabbit stopped dead, saying— “You’d best go by the clearing, and I through the scrub; it will never do to let the polecat see us. We will meet at the foot of a great oak you can’t help seeing.” Jannot followed his companion’s advice; but no sooner were they together again than the rabbit, after fifty yards or so, cried out once more— “The place we’re in now is just as dangerous as the other. A wild-cat lurks hereabouts, and slaughters whatever comes under his claws. You go that way; I’ll go this. A rock you will see will serve as rendezvous.” They reached the rock at the same moment, and then trotted off again. They were just coming to a coppice of young trees with narrow winding paths through it when his experienced friend called a halt for the third time, crying— “Well, we did well not to travel side by side. My advice is that we go each his own way again, without bothering about one another, till we come to the crossroads you’ll find down yonder. Ah! d’ye see those snares? Mind you don’t get into them, for if the polecat and the wild-cat are lords of the lands we have just been through, the poacher rules here as monarch paramount.” The advice was good, but its giver had no time to finish it; he was caught by the foot in one of the gins, and the more he struggled to get free, the tighter the dreadful noose was drawn. “Help! help!” he clamoured. But already Jannot was off and away, panic-stricken; he ran on and on, never once stopping till he won back as quick as ever he could to the edge of the woodland where he and Master Rabbit had first met. “If the world is so strewn with dangers,” he thought to himself, “better to live in peace and quietness in a hutch. What use in roaming the woods, when death is at the journey’s end?” Then in his mind’s eye he saw his mother again and his brothers; and the safe shelter where they awaited his return seemed a far-off, happy refuge he could hardly hope to reach. Field-mice and weasels and martens were stirring in the dark underwood and shaking the leaves. Suddenly a new terror, more appalling than all the rest, gripped him; he thought he was being pursued. Then he dashed out into the plain that lay clear in the moonlight, and, with ears pricked, thinking all the while he could hear at his heels the unwearying, unflagging trot, trot of the fell creatures that were on his track, he pushed through hedges, leapt ditches, climbed banks. He had his back to the moon, and two black shadows, the same he had seen at the outset of his escapade, stretched out before him; this time they went in front, never leaving him, and sometimes lengthening out to portentous proportions. No doubt about it, a whole host of enemies was after him!