Page:White - The natural history of Selborne, and the naturalist's calendar, 1879.djvu/237

Rh affected with any tenderness towards an animal which is its natural prey, is not so easy to determine.

This strange affection probably was occasioned by that desiderium, those tender maternal feelings, which the loss of her kittens had awakened in her breast; and by the complacency and ease she derived to herself from the procuring her teats to be drawn, which were too much distended with milk, till, from habit, she became as much delighted with this foundling as if it had been her real offspring.

This incident is no bad solution of that strange circumstance which grave historians as well as the poets assert, of exposed children being sometimes nurtured by female wild beasts that probably had lost their young. For it is not one whit more marvellous that Romulus and Remus, in their infant state, should be nursed by a she-wolf, than that a poor little sucking leveret should be fostered and cherished by a bloody grimalkin.

1 An incident told me by Mr. Harrett, of Kirkwhelpington, may well be told here. He has a fine colley bitch which had young ones. She was annoyed by a cat prowling about them, and killed it. This cat had one small kitten, which the maids tried to rear by hand in the kitchen. The bitch hearing its cries fetched it away and laid it among her own pups, suckling it until they were all weaned together, thus atoning as far as she could for the murder of its mother.