Page:White - The natural history of Selborne, and the naturalist's calendar, 1879.djvu/236

214 the same means. At the age of about fifteen her litters began to be reduced to four or five; and such a litter she exhibited when in her fatting-pen. She proved, when fat, good bacon, juicy, and tender; the rind, or sward, was remarkably thin. At a moderate computation she was allowed to have been the fruitful parent of three hundred pigs: a prodigious instance of fecundity in so large a quadruped! She was killed in spring 1775.

I am, etc.

LETTER XXXIV. , May 9th, 1776.

,—We have remarked in a former letter how much incongruous animals, in a lonely state, may be attached to each other from a spirit of sociality; in this it may not be amiss to recount a different motive which has been known to create as strange a fondness.

My friend had a little helpless leveret brought to him, which the servants fed with milk in a spoon, and about the same time his cat kittened and the young were dispatched and buried. The hare was soon lost, and supposed to be gone the way of most fondlings, to be killed by some dog or cat. However, in about a fortnight, as the master was sitting in his garden in the dusk of the evening, he observed his cat, with tail erect, trotting towards him, and calling with little short inward notes of complacency, such as they use towards their kittens, and something gambling after, which proved to be the leveret that the cat had supported with her milk, and continued to support with great affection. 1

Thus was a graminivorous animal nurtured by a carnivorous and predaceous one! Why so cruel and sanguinary a beast as a cat, of the ferocious genus of Felis, the murium leo, as Linnæus calls it, should be