In fact, the time of chief danger was the night. He was abroad then, but it was impossible to see more than a few yards ahead, so that once he almost ran into the farm cat in the mushroom field; two nights later he brushed close past a badger that was stretching itself against the upright of a cromlech. However, no harm ensued; for the hare leapt aside and was lost to sight in the fog as effectually as if he had been covered with a mass of cotton wool. He got glimpses of other animals in his wanderings, though so vaguely that he failed to identify them. Moreover in the strange conditions the hare himself sometimes proved a terror to creatures he stumbled on, causing a hedgehog to curl up in affright on the Five Acres, and scaring a heron out of its senses on the moor beyond. The fog was as impervious to scent as to sight, and he was on his victims before they heard him, for the fog deadened all sound, of footfall, of bird cry, even of the great foghorn on the Longships, which sounded like a penny trumpet. But of all the ills attendant on those ceaseless mists, the one which caused the hare most discomfort was the moisture that collected on the herbage and dripped on his back as he sat in the form. Two days he endured the misery; then he left the comfortable seat for the shelter of the fallen masonry of the chantry, and sat cheek by jowl with an enormous toad who resented his company till he got to understand and like him. [Illustration: _C. Reid._, _To face p. 84._ “GREY FOX.”] On the fourth day, however, that the hare saw the great bank of fog come moving landwards from the sea, to the joy of man and beast an easterly wind set in which banished the fog and dried the sodden herbage, rendering the form habitable again. It was a keen, biting wind, but the hare felt no inconvenience. One sign of the cold snap was the red shawl in which the farmer’s wife rode to market; another, quite as unmistakable, was the advent of the woodcock, whom the hare found sitting near the seat two days later. The stranger was unlike any bird he had seen; it had rich brown plumage beautifully pencilled, a very long bill, and soft black eyes which looked fearlessly into his. The hare, unobservant though he usually was of such matters, could not help seeing that it was very jaded and weary; and weary it might well be, for it had but just accomplished its long flight from Heligoland.