truest pleasures is, sitting snug at their own doors, to watch their

children's gambols.

For this is the time, with the light upon the slope, and the freshness

of salt flowing in from the sea, when the spirit of youth must be free

of the air, and the quickness of life is abounding. Without any heed

of the cares that are coming, or the prick-eared fears of the elders, a

fine lot of young bunnies with tails on the frisk scour everywhere over

the warren. Up and down the grassy dips and yellow piles of wind-drift,

and in and out of the ferny coves and tussocks of rush and ragwort, they

scamper, and caper, and chase one another, in joy that the winter is

banished at last, and the glorious sun come back again.

Suddenly, as at the wave of a wand, they all stop short and listen. The

sun is behind them, low and calm, there is not a breath of wind to

stir their flax, not even the feather of a last year's bloom has moved,

unless they moved it. Yet signal of peril has passed among them; they

curve their soft ears for the sound of it, and open their sensitive

nostrils, and pat upon the ground with one little foot to encourage

themselves against the panting of their hearts and the traitorous length

of their shadows.

Ha! Not for nothing was their fear this day. An active and dangerous

specimen of the human race was coming, lightly and gracefully skimming

the moss, above salt-water reach, of the stepping-stones. The steps

are said to be a thousand years old, and probably are of half that age,

belonging to a time when sound work was, and a monastery flourished

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