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The hedgehogs were about three months old, and summer, brief and beautiful, was passing away, when an incident occurred that might have proved disastrous, though, fortunately, it resulted only in a practical joke, such as Nature often plays on the children of the wilds. One calm, dark night, while they were busy in the grass, a brown owl, hunting for mice, sailed slowly by.
Nor would John Clare have written affectionately about him had he been entirely bloody-minded. Then there was the hedgehog. The charm of hedgehogs is that we do not see them every day that their appearance is a secret and an accident. They are a part of the busy life that goes on all about us as mysteriously as the movements of spirits.
The Committee sit open-minded, listening with laudable impartiality; it does not become them to arrive at a hasty decision on a question of such magnitude. In the meantime the House passes an important bill dealing with the bounty on hedgehogs, and there are several card games going on in the cellar, where it is cool.
It would seem that the hedgehog is also externally insensible to poison, for it fights with adders, and is bitten about the lips and nose without receiving any injury. An experiment has been made by administering prussic acid to it, which took no effect. It is well known that hedgehogs are covered with bristles, amounting to sharp prickles, and that they roll themselves up into a ball.
Besides all our domestic animals and every kind of game, such strange delicacies as hedgehogs, bustards, porpoises, squirrels, bitterns and cranes lent variety to the feast.
The nest was made of dry grass and leaves, and with an entrance so arranged amid the "trash," that, when the parent hedgehogs went to or from their home, they pushed their way through a heap of dead herbage, which, falling behind them, hid the passage from inquisitive eyes.
He tamed two snakes last half, and used to carry them about in his pocket; and I'll be bound he's got some hedgehogs and rats in his cupboard now, and no one knows what besides." "I should like very much to know him," said Arthur; "he was next to me in the form to-day, and he'd lost his book and looked over mine, and he seemed so kind and gentle that I liked him very much."
Just then I heard a shout and a rushing sound; a wild-looking figure is descending the hill with terrible bounds; it is a lad of some fifteen years; he is bare-headed, and his red uncombed hair stands on end like hedgehogs' bristles: his frame is lithy, like that of an antelope, but he has prodigious breadth of chest; he wears a military undress, that of the regiment, even of a drummer, for it is wild Davy, whom a month before I had seen enlisted on Leith Links to serve King George with drum and drumstick as long as his services might be required, and who, ere a week had elapsed, had smitten with his fist Drum-Major Elzigood, who, incensed at his inaptitude, had threatened him with his cane; he has been in confinement for weeks, this is the first day of his liberation, and he is now descending the hill with horrid bounds and shoutings; he is now about five yards distant, and the baker, who apprehends that something dangerous is at hand, prepares himself for the encounter; but what avails the strength of a baker, even full grown? what avails the defence of a wicker shield? what avails the wheel-spoke, should there be an opportunity of using it, against the impetus of an avalanche or a cannon-ball? for to either of these might that wild figure be compared, which, at the distance of five yards, sprang at once with head, hands, feet and body, all together, upon the champion of the New Town, tumbling him to the earth amain.
Everything excited his interest, curiosity, and tenderness. Bears, eagles, vipers, jackals, hedgehogs, and snakes roomed with him. He not only lived on intimate terms with his zoological curiosities, petting them, training them, studying them, but he finally ate them. As Douglas Jerrold said of the New Zealanders, "Very economical people. We only kill our enemies; they eat 'em.
As a matter of fact, it is unlikely that Prickles for such was the name of our hedgehog would have gone that risky way, traveled so unhealthily far, left his more or less mostly less safe home wood at all, had it not been that it is sometimes with hedgehogs as it is with men in the warm seasons their fancy turns to thoughts of love.
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