them. They were very tame, not seeming to regard our presence as a
thing of much danger to them.

"Seeing those rabbits," remarked Smith, "reminds me of an anecdote of
my boyhood, which at the time occasioned me an amount of mortification
equalled only by the amusement it affords me, when I think of it in
after years. On my father's farm was a bush field, a place that had
been chopped and burned over, and then left to grow up with bushes,
making an excellent cover for wild wood rabbits. I had seen them
hopping about, when I went to turn away the cows in the morning, or
after them at night. I had a longing to 'make game' of them. I had a
brother a good deal older than myself, who was as fond of a joke as I
was of the rabbits, and who was quite as ready to make game of me, as
I was of them; so he told me, one day to put an apple on a stick over
their paths, high enough to be just above their reach, and a handful
of Scotch snuff on a dry leaf on the ground under it, and the rabbits,
while smelling for the apple, would inhale the snuff, and sneeze
themselves to death in no tune. Well, I was a child then and simple
enough to be gammoned by this rigmarole. I set the apple and the
snuff, but I got no rabbit, while I did get laughed at hugely for my
credulity. This satisfied me that people should never impose upon the
simplicity of childhood. I remember my mortification on the occasion.
It was so long ago that it stands out by itself, a mere fragment of
memory, with _all_ beyond it a blank, and a wide gap out this side. It
is an isolated fact, fixed in my recollection by the pain it
occasioned me."

"Your anecdote of the rabbits," said the Doctor, "reminds me of a
story told of a Dutchman, who discovered an owl on a limb above him,
and noticed that its face, and great round eyes, followed him always