During the confusion the mother partridge which the Red-faced Man had shot had been forgotten by everybody except Tom. Tom, you see, was certain that he had shot it himself, being a very obstinate boy, and was determined to retrieve it as his own. Now that partridge had fallen within a yard of me, with its beak and claws pointing to the sky, and when the line had passed where we lay Tom lagged behind to look for it. He did not find it then, whether he ever found it afterwards I am sure I don’t know. But he found me. “By Jove! here’s a hare,” he said, and made a grab at me just as he had done in the furze bush. Well, I went. Tom shot when I wasn’t more than four yards from him, and the whole charge passed like a bullet between my hind legs and struck the ground under my stomach, sending up such a shower of earth and stones that I was knocked right over. “I’ve hit it!” yelled Tom, as he crammed another cartridge into his single-barrelled gun. By the time that it was loaded I was quite thirty yards away and going like the wind. Tom lifted the gun. “Don’t shoot!” roared the Red-faced Man. “Mind that there boy!” bellowed Giles. I was running down between two rows of turnips and presently butted into a lad who was bending over, I suppose to pick up a partridge. At any rate his tail—“do you call it his tail, Mahatma?” “That will do,” I answered. “Well, his tail was towards me; it looked very round and shiny. The shot from Tom’s gun hit it everywhere. I wish they had all gone into it, but as he was so far away the charge scattered and six of the bullets struck me. Oh! they did hurt. Put your hand on my back, Mahatma, and you will feel the six lumps they made beneath the grey tufts of hair that grew over them, for they are still there.” Forgetting that we were on the Road, I stretched out my hand; but, of course, it went quite through the hare, although I could see the six little grey tufts clearly enough. “You are foolish, Hare; you don’t remember that your body is not here but somewhere else.” “Quite true, Mahatma. If it were here I could not be talking to you, could I? As a matter of fact, I have no body now. It is—oh, never mind where. Still, you can see the grey tufts, can’t you? Well, I only hope that those shot hurt that fat boy half as much as they did me. No, I don’t mean that I hope it now, I used to hope it.” My goodness! didn’t he screech, much worse than my father when his legs were broken. And didn’t everybody else roar and shout, and didn’t I dance? Off I went right over the fat boy, who had tumbled down, up to the end of the field, then so bewildered was I with shock and the burning pain, back again quite close to them. But now nobody shot at me because they all thought the boy was killed and were gathered round him looking very solemn. Only I saw that the Red-faced Man had Tom by the neck and was kicking him hard.