THE MARCH HARE.

Otago Witness, Issue 2103, 14 June 1894, Page 42

THE MARCH HARE.

Why is the March hare branded as mad 7 This is a question which may pnzzle a good many besides Alice in Wonderland, to whom the tea party with the Hare and the Hatter brought no enlightenment. Mad is an epithet easily applied often by people who are too stupid ever to run any risk of the malady. A hare once netted as a precaution by the keeper will not be netted again by the cleverest poacher, whatever he may do with the deadly and unobtrusive wire. If hares have such an amount of sanity in perilous autumn, why should they have less in peaceful spring, when all legitimate hostility is tabooed 1 And certainly their surroundings are such as should conduce to a calm and pleasurable mental condition. The fields are starred with early flowers, primroses and daffodils contrasting with shy violets and dainty celandines. Green is the meadow, a tenderer green marks the larch boughs ; the coppice trees are in bud; the thrush warbles from the elms, the chiffchaff sings from the ashboughs; the early trout are rising at the first insect life, and ignoring that imitated by the enthusiastic angler, who utters the only jarring note in the concert. Amid such surroundings the hare" is deemed to be mad. Why? Because, like the innocent and the lark, whom Oowper sings, the hare is gay. For it is pairing time, and it is gaiete dv cwvr which induces the hares to behave in an unusual manner.

Those only familiar with them when coursed or shot would be astonished at their gambols in March. They are then seen in little groups in the fields ; they curvet and gambol, as Charles Lamb says of his pen ; they indulge in leaps and bounds, they play together with coquettings and chasings of each other under the hedgerows, white with blackthorn and sloeblossom and pink with crabtree bloom ; they are full of antics such as Cowper saw in his tame pets, for Alma Venus asserts her sway. — Saturday Review.