loathsome reptile let go the little one's ear and tried to bite the old
one as she leaped over. But all he got was a mouthful of wool each
time, and Molly's fierce blows began to tell, as long bloody rips
were torn in the Black Snake's scaly armor.

Things were now looking bad for the Snake; and bracing himself
for the next charge, he lost his tight hold on Baby Bunny, who at
once wriggled out of the coils and away into the underbrush,
breathless and- terribly frightened, but unhurt save that his left ear
was much torn by the teeth of that dreadful Serpent.

Molly now had gained all she wanted. She had no notion of
fighting for glory or revenge. Away she went into the woods and
the little one followed the shining beacon of her snow-white tail
until she led him to a safe corner of the Swamp.

II

Old Olifant's Swamp was a rough, brambly tract of second-growth
woods, with a marshy pond and a stream through the middle. A
few ragged remnants of the old forest still stood in it and a few of
the still older trunks were lying about as dead logs in the
brushwood. The land about the pond was of that willow-grown
sedgy kind that cats and horses avoid, but that cattle do not fear.
The drier zones were overgrown with briars and young trees. The
outermost belt of all, that next the fields, was of thrifty,
gummy-trunked young pines whose living needles in air and dead
ones on earth offer so delicious an odor to the nostrils of the
passer-by, and so deadly a breath to those seedlings that would
compete with them for the worthless waste they grow on.