one occasion on which he was invited to luncheon at Mrs. Ewing's hut,
that I might have the pleasure of making his acquaintance; he had to
be unwillingly carried across the Lines in the arms of an obliging
subaltern, but directly he arrived, without waiting even for the first
course, he struggled out of the officer's embrace and galloped back to
his own mess-table, tail erect and thick with rage at the indignity he
had undergone.

"Father Hedgehog and his Friends," in this same volume (1876), was
also written to some excellent German woodcuts; and it, too, is a
wonderfully brilliant sketch of animal life; perhaps the human beings
in the tale are scarcely done justice to. We feel as if Sybil and
Basil, and the Gipsy Mother and Christian, had scarcely room to
breathe in the few pages that they are crowded into; there is
certainly too much "subject" here for the size of the canvas!--but
Father Hedgehog takes up little space, and every syllable about him is
as keenly pointed as the spines on his back. The method by which he
silenced awkward questions from any of his family is truly delightful:

"Will the donkey be cooked when he is fat?" asked my mother.

"I smell valerian," said my father, on which she put out her nose,
and he ran at it with his prickles. He always did this when he was
annoyed with any of his family; and though we knew what was coming,
we are all so fond of valerian, we could never resist the
temptation to sniff, just on the chance of there being some about.

Then, the following season, we find the Hedgehog Son grown into a
parent, and, with the "little hoard of maxims" he had inherited,
checking the too inquiring minds of his offspring: