The terrified fellow ran for two miles along his mother’s trail without halting; then coming to some briers he stopped to nibble the shoots, for he was very hungry. He would have stayed longer than he did had not the rosy foreglow in the sky warned him to be off. So again he took to the trail and hurried along at his best pace, scaring the boy at Brea Farm, who took him for a pixie, as he whisked past the gap on his way to the Fairies’ Green, where for an hour or more his mother and sister had been sitting in their forms. The magpies saw him coming, but chattered no reproach to the belated creature; though to a fox cub they would have shown no mercy. After he had made his toilet, enjoying the taste of the salt water, he sat moving his jaws as if he were chewing the cud. He was really crushing some grains of sand, of which he had picked up a mouthful on the beach, and the curious noise completely puzzled the magpies, who tried in vain to locate it. The dew was being fast dried up by the sun before it ceased: then the slow regular rise and fall of his flank told he was asleep. That night the hare took the jack and his sister a way they had not been before. It led over Caer Bran to Boswarthen, where all three gambolled like mad things in the corn before going down the hill to Tregonebris. There, after feasting on the pinks in which the farmer’s wife took special pride, they passed to the field of mowing-grass before the house and played on the heap of earth in the far corner, the hare joining in the frolics with a zest she had not shown since she led them up Bartinney. By this time the air, which had been oppressively close, had become more sultry than ever, till towards midnight the impending storm broke, zigzagging the inky sky with fierce lightning. Immediately the silence was rent by claps of thunder, and a torrent of rain followed which drenched the hares before they could gain the shelter of the hedge. When at length it ceased they galloped up and down the path leading to the house and dried themselves; but they were drenched again before dawn. They looked a forlorn little band as they ambled over the fields in a downpour. Yet, miserable though their plight seemed, they passed a clump of brambles which at least offered a partial refuge; farther up the hill they passed another, more inviting still; indeed they kept on as if regardless of all cover till they reached the summit of Caer Bran, where they sought seats under the furze mantling the slope of the outer of the earthworks that crown it. The wind blew, the rain pelted, but the high bank and domed roof protected them from all discomfort save that caused by the drippings of the sodden bushes. This the creatures endured through the long day without once stirring in their forms.