There are the white
marks on your back, and there is the grey splotch on your ear. Oh! if
only I had a gun--a real gun!"
"You would shoot me, wouldn't you, or try to?" said the Hare. "Well, you
haven't and you can't. You say I cost you your life. What do you mean?
It was my life that was sacrificed, not yours."
"Indeed," answered the Man, "I thought you got away. Never saw any more
of you after you jumped through the French window. Never had time. The
last thing I remember is her Ladyship screaming like a mad cockatoo,
yes, and abusing me as though I were a pickpocket, with the drawing-room
all on fire. Then something happened, and down I went among the broken
china and hit my head against the leg of a table. Next came a kind of
whirling blackness and I woke up here."
"A fit or a stroke," I suggested.
"Both, I think, sir. The fit first--I have had 'em before, and the
stroke afterwards--against the leg of the table. Anyway they finished me
between them, thanks to that little beast."
Then it was that I saw a very strange thing, a hare in a rage. It seemed
to go mad, of course I mean spiritually mad. Its eyes flashed fire; it
opened its mouth and shut it after the fashion of a suffocating fish. At
last it spoke in its own way--I cannot stop to explain in further detail
the exact manner of speech or rather of its equivalent upon the Road.
"Man, Man," it exclaimed, "you say that I finished you. But what did you
do to me? You shot me.
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