ground, and then clasped his fore-paws over his head and let himself
tumble amongst them. Every club was raised, but Bruin was on the alert;
he made a charge, upset the man immediately in front, and escaped with
two or three thumps on the rump, which he valued not one pin. When once
they have killed a pig, if you do not manage to kill the bear, you will
never keep one hog; for they will come back till they have taken the
last of them;--they will even invade the sacred precincts of the
hog-sty. An Irishman in the Newcastle district once caught a bear
_flagrante delicto_, dragging a hog over the walls of the pew. Pat,
instead of assailing the bear, thought only of securing his property; so
he jumped into the sty, and seized the pig by the tail. Bruin having
hold of the ears, they had a dead pull for possession, till the
whillilooing of Pat, joined to the plaintive notes of his _protegé_,
brought a neighbour to his assistance, who decided the contest in Pat's
favour by knocking the assailant on the head.--A worthy friend of mine,
of the legal profession, and now high in office in the colony, once,
when a young man, lost his way in the woods, and seeing a high stump,
clambered up it with the hope of looking around him. While standing on
the top of it for this purpose, his foot slipped, and he was
precipitated into the hollow of the tree, beyond the power of
extricating himself. Whilst bemoaning here his hard fate, and seeing no
prospect before him, save that of a lingering death by starvation, the
light above his head was suddenly excluded, and his view of the sky, his
only prospect, shut out by the intervention of a dense medium, and by
and by he felt the hairy posteriors of a bear descend upon him. With the
courage of despair he seized fast hold of Bruin behind, and by this
means was dragged once more into upper day. Nothing, surely, but the
instinct of consanguinity could have induced Bruin thus to extricate his
distressed brother.