Page:The Folk-Lore Journal Volume 1 1883.djvu/94

care—Dr. White Kennett supplies us with an excellent reason for the melancholy of some intelligent hares culminating in suicide:

"Memorand: It is found by experience that when one keepes a hare alive, and feedeth him till he have occasion to eat him, if he telles before he killes him that he will doe so, the hare will thereupon be found dead, having killed himself."^[1]

Cogan, at least, would not have advised the death of a hare with a view to the table, for he tells us that "hare-flesh beside that it is hard of digestion, maketh grosse and melancholy bloud, and is one of the foure kindes of flesh that breed melancholy, mentioned before in the chapter of these. Wherefore it is not for the goodness of the flesh that this silly beast is so often chased with hounds and hunters, but for pastime. Yet thus much will I say to the commendation of the hare, and of the defence of hunters' toyle, that no one beast, be it never so great, is profitable to so many and so diverse uses in physicke as the hare and partes thereof, as Matth. [lib. 2, Dios. cap. 18] sheweth .... The ankle-bone of the foote of an hare is good against the cramp."^[2]

In the Kaffir story of "the great chief of animals," it is to a hare that the woman who has to go from home for a time leaves the care of her children; but the hare is a poor guardian, for she runs away to a distance to watch, and when the terrible monster comes and demands the names of the children, she gives them at once, upon which the animal immediately swallows them entire.^[3]

But the hare is not regarded always as merely melancholy, silly, or frightening without apparent reason. The hare is often credited with supernatural powers. It was certainly made use of in augury—on a celebrated occasion in the history of our own country by Boadicea^[4]— but its legendary association with witchcraft is not, in my opinion, directly traceable to any traditional augury. The hare appears to be Like the cat, an ally of the witch. Fishers of Fifeshire "look on all

1. Aubrey's Remains of Gentilisme, pp. 101-102.
2. Haven of Health, 1605, pp. 118-119.
3. Theal's Kaffir Folk-Lore, p. 164.
4. Brand (Popular Antiquities, ed. 1877, p. 690) will have it that because the ancient Britons used the hare for purposes of divination, its consequent absence from the table gave rise to its ill repute in ordinary matters.