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The breeze was blowing shoreward, tempering the warmth of the sun and bringing brine and the odour of seaweed to mingle with the perfume of bell-heather from the moors. Laddie stepped lightly beside his young friends, waving his tail in the air, and now and again pausing to investigate a rabbit-burrow or an interesting tuft of heather or cotton-grass.
They dig a hollow under ground, in a horizontal direction, like a rabbit-burrow, about two yards long, and opening into a hole at each end, one of which is large, and the other small: By the large hole the fire is put in, and the small one serves for a draught.
A shallow trench, trimmed with an untidy parapet of sandbags, and there is your stronghold! For rest and meditation, a hole in the ground, half-full of water and roofed with a sheet of galvanised iron; or possibly a glorified rabbit-burrow in a canal-bank. These things, as a modern poet has observed, are all right in the summer-time. But winter here is a disintegrating season.
For if the changes of the lower animals are so wonderful, and so difficult to discover, why should not there be changes in the higher animals far more wonderful, and far more difficult to discover? And may not man, the crown and flower of all things, undergo some change as much more wonderful than all the rest, as the Great Exhibition is more wonderful than a rabbit-burrow? Let him answer that.
He had posted his men at the front and back doors and also at the side entrance through which Senora Gredos in her disguise as Mrs. Herne had entered. He never considered for the moment that so clever a woman might have some way of escape other than he had guessed. "Yet I might have thought it," he said, when Cuthbert and he left the house. "I expect that place is like a rabbit-burrow.
Do you know, one evening when old Isaac came to see me, I made him laugh about the puffins till the tears ran down his face. It was with showing him that old stuffed puffin, and telling him how the puffin gets into a rabbit-burrow, and when the rabbit comes back they set to and fight, and the puffin generally gets the best of it with having such a great hooked nose. Isaac was so funny.
As she spoke she produced from her pocket a handy little "housewife," containing needles and thread, as well as a thimble, which useful articles the good lady seldom stirred out without; and, sitting down on a shawl which the Captain spread over a bit of turf that he assured her was free from nettles, and ten yards at least from the nearest rabbit-burrow, she proceeded to sew away at a brisk rate on the torn frock of Miss Nellie, who sat herself demurely beside her aunt.
He knew every oak and pine and fir and nut tree as a familiar friend. He knew every rivulet, every ravine, every rabbit-burrow. The streams seemed to him as melodious as the song-birds, and the winds had voices. He knew where to find the first blossom of spring and the latest of autumn, the ripest fruit and most abundant vines.
They have no right save that of possession; the same by which the puffin turns out the old rabbits, eats the young ones, and then lays her eggs in the rabbit-burrow simply because she can.
An iron pump and water trough in front of the hotel saved the wayfarer from the necessity of riding his animals down to the river. The vista at the end of the street showed a mill building on a distant mountain side, with the rabbit-burrow dumps of many shafts and prospect holes all about it. They rode up the street past two or three of the houses, the hotel and the office.
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