Farther on we crossed a plateau where a series of stumps showed where a grove of chestnut trees had grown in the days before the Blight. Suddenly from under our very feet dashed a brown rabbit, his white powder-puff gleaming at every jump. The lithe, lean, springing body seemed the very embodiment of speed. There are few animals that can pass a rabbit in a hundred yards, even our cottontail, the slowest of his family. He is, however, only a sprinter. In a long-distance event the fox, the dog, and even the dogged, devilish little weasel can run him down. We looked at the form where he had been lying. It was a wet little hollow made in the dank grass, with only a few dripping leaves for a mattress--a forlorn bed. Yet Runny-Bunny, as some children I know have named him, seems to rest well in his open-air sleeping porch, and even lies abed there. One far-away snowy day in February two of us stole a few moments from the bedside of a sick child--how long, long ago it all seems now!--and walked out among the wild-folk to forget. In a bleak meadow, right at our feet, we saw a rabbit crouched, nearly covered by the snow. He had been snowed under days before, but had slept out the storm until half of his fleecy coverlet had melted away. He lay so still that at first we thought he was dead; but on looking closely, we could see the quick throbbing of his frightened little heart. There was not a quiver from his taut body, or a blink from his wide-open eyes. He lay motionless until my hand stroked gently his wet fur. Then, indeed, he exploded like a brown bomb-shell from the snow, and we laughed and laughed, the first and last time for many a weary week. Years later, I was coasting down the meadow-hill with one of my boys; and, as the sled came to a stop, a rabbit burst out of the snow, almost between the runners. The astonished boy rolled into a drift as if blown clear off his sled by the force of the explosion. To-day, as the Brownie sped over the soft snow, we could see how its tracks in series of fours were made. At every jump the long hind-legs thrust themselves far in front. They made the two far-apart tracks in the snow, while the close-set fore-paws made the nearby tracks. Accordingly a rabbit is always traveling in the direction of the far-apart tracks, quite contrary to what most of us would suppose. It is the same way with celestial rabbits. Look any clear winter night down below the belt of Orion, and you will see a great rabbit-track in the sky--the constellation of Lepus, the Hare, whose track leads away from the Great Dog with baleful Sirius gleaming green in his fell jaw.