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Horsfall seems to think that nature would be sufficient to take care of her own interests if man did not step in to aid her endeavours; but if he is a sportsman he no doubt has a game- keeper, who not only preserves the ground from poachers, but traps cats and weasels, shoots hawks, magpies and carrion crows, breeds tame pheasants, and generally looks to the well being of the game without trusting to the efforts of unassisted nature.
The domestic cat always looks as if half his tail had been taken off in a trap. The domestic dog is the Asiatic, not the European dog, a leggy, ugly, vagrant, uncared-for fellow, furnishing a useful simile and little more. Weasels, squirrels, polecats, porcupines, and other small animals exist in numbers, and the mermaid, of the genus Halicore, connects the inhabitants of the land and water.
"If a hawk or owl, or any other of the larger hunters of the woodland, were to give chase to a weasel and endeavour to pounce upon it, it would in all probability be the black tip of the tail it would see and strike at, while the weasel, darting ahead, would escape. It may, morever, serve as a guide, enabling the young weasels to follow their parents more readily through grass and brambles.
But the taint of blood on the floor of the chamber told her only too well that henceforth her mothering care would be needed solely by the young mouse that she had rescued in her flight. The day passed uneventfully; the weasels did not repeat their visit. At nightfall the mother mouse, stealing into the wood, found both her enemies caught in rabbit-traps set beside the "runs" among the hawthorns.
The Weasels had, it seems, certain sworn friends, for birds of a feather flock together, and these were not far to seek, as they were the Thorns, Burrs, and Briers of all kinds, Hornets and other winged and stinged insects, besides the Ants. And they were, moreover, intimate with all the sharp-edged Flints in the land, which was a goodly company.
None of them, however, much exceed the size of the ordinary cat: unless we include the gluttons and wolverenes among the weasels, as naturalists sometimes do, notwithstanding that these animals differ altogether from them.
These weasels often hunt in packs like the British stoat. When I was a boy, my father one day armed me with an old musket and sent me to shoot chipmunks around the corn. While watching the squirrels, a troop of weasels tried to cross a bar-way where I sat, and were so bent on doing it that I fired at them, boy-like, simply to thwart their purpose.
It would be a bad day for you if you could." "But you must admit that both you and the rat are increasing in numbers, and, therefore, in destructiveness. What is to be the end of it?" "The end of it will be that you will preserve our enemies instead of shooting them at sight." "Meaning?" "Hawks, owls, weasels, and so on." "But hawks would never come near the towns?"
"I think, sometimes, I ought not to keep my dear squirrel in a cage shall I let him go?" "My dear, he has now been so used to the cage, and to have all his daily wants supplied, that I am sure he would suffer from cold and hunger at this season of the year if he were left to provide for himself; and if he remained here the cats and weasels might kill him."
The moment a real falls into their clutches, they condemn it to perpetual imprisonment; so that by dint of perpetually accumulating and never spending, they have got the greater part of the money of Spain into their hands. They are the grubs, the magpies, the weasels of the nation.
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