The situation was beyond the power of words, and it was strange to see how the Squire met it. He dashed the rod to the ground, he paced up and down the bank like a man demented, he shook his fist at the withies, he shook it at the rushes, and kept shaking it till at length, after having beaten a path on the turf, he had worked off his rage. Then he sat down on the bank, filled his pipe and blew clouds of smoke. The tobacco had a soothing effect: soon he was debating with himself whether to break the cast or go and release the hook. He resolved to go round, but first he would try to free it where he sat. So he took up the rod, flicked the line, and then, as bad luck would have it, the fly came away. Yes, it was bad luck, for few things would have surprised and delighted the Squire more than the sight of a hare, whom he must have disturbed had he been compelled to go round. He would have been thrilled by the discovery that the hare was not, as he believed, extinct on his land. But it was a joy postponed; he was to see the hare before the year was out, in circumstances as different from those as imagination can conceive. And meanwhile the hare, whose immunity from molestation had been remarkable, was destined to undergo a series of terrible trials, the first of which, strangely enough, befell it that very night. ----- [2] Barley-bread and skimmed milk. [3] The old harvest custom of “crying the neck.” CHAPTER IV CHASED BY POLECATS The sun had sunk below the hill, and Golden Valley lay in shadow and repose. Zekiah, the miller, his work done at last, sat smoking his pipe on the bench by the door; the mill-wheel was at rest, and the stream was slowly refilling the nearly emptied pond where, from time to time, a wave in the shallows betrayed the movement of a trout. Overhead a few swifts yet wheeled: but yellow-hammer, whinchat, blackcap, whitethroat, and long-tailed tit had sought roosting-places in the furze, and the magpie that haunted the mill had withdrawn to his perch in the hawthorn. For them the hour for rest had come; the moment when nocturnal creatures quit their retreat drew near. The bat was on the point of leaving the crevice under the eaves; the owl in the ivied scarp, the vixen in the earth overlooking the fowling-pool watched the shadows deepen, and still more impatient was the leveret, who already after a two nights’ absence was longing for a feast of clover. With the peeping of the stars he sprang from the form, leapt the stream at the inflow, and gaining the crest of the hill, made over the upland almost straight as a crow flies for his destination.