“How superstitiously we mind our evils! The throwing down of salt, or crossing of a hare, Bleeding at nose, the stumbling of a horse, Or singing of a cricket, are of power To daunt whole man in us.” This superstition arose from the belief that witches sometimes transformed themselves into hares. In Ellison’s “Trip to Benwell,” we find the following congratulatory lines:— “Nor did we meet, with nimble feet, One little fearful lepus;[55] That certain sign, as some divine, Of fortune bad to keep us.” In Aubrey’s “Remaines of Gentilisme and Judaisme,” written in the year 1586, it is stated, as “found by Experience, that when one keepes a Hare alive and feedeth him till he have occasion to eat him, if he telles before he killes him that he will doe so the hare will thereupon be found dead, having killed himself.” One really scarcely sees what the creature gains by this proceeding. Old writers tell us that when the hare is fainting with the heat, a state of things that one may hope does not often occur, it recruits its strength by munching up sowthistle. Topsell says that there is no leporine ailment that this plant will not cure, and that directly the hare feels a little unwell he seeks sowthistle and goes in for a course of diet. Askham goes so far as to say that “yf a hare eate of this herbe in somer when he is mad he shal be hole,” but as hares are proverbially held to be specially _non compos mentis_ in March, the treatment seems to come a little late. All boys who have kept rabbits will recall how appreciatively they nibble up the succulent sowthistle leaves and stems, and probably it is just as welcome to the hares, not as a medicinal herb or a help to sanity, but as a toothsome item in the daily fare. It will be remembered that in 1 Henry IV. i. 2, Shakespeare uses the expression “Melancholy as a hare,” and as it was believed in mediæval days that those who partook of the flesh of any animal thereby partook also of its nature, the flesh of the hare was supposed to generate melancholia, and was therefore avoided. Why the hare should be considered of a desponding temperament no one seemed to know.