SELBORNE, _May_ 9_th_, 1776.
" . . . admorunt ubera tigres."
Dear Sir,--We have remarked in a former letter {83} how much incongruous
animals, in a lonely state, may be attached to each other from a spirit
of sociality; in this it may not be amiss to recount a different motive
which has been known to create as strange a fondness. My friend had a
little helpless leveret brought to him, which the servants fed with milk
in a spoon, and about the same time his cat kittened and the young were
dispatched and buried. The hare was soon lost, and supposed to be gone
the way of most foundlings, to be killed by some dog or cat. However, in
about a fortnight, as the master was sitting in his garden in the dusk of
the evening, he observed his cat, with tail erect, trotting towards him,
and calling with little short inward notes of complacency, such as they
use towards their kittens, and something gamboling after, which proved to
be the leveret that the cat had supported with her milk, and continued to
support with great affection.
Thus was a graminivorous animal nurtured by a carnivorous and predaceous
one!
Why so cruel and sanguinary a beast as a cat, of the ferocious genus of
_Felis_, the _murium leo_, as Linnaeus calls it, should be affected with
any tenderness towards an animal which is its natural prey, is not so
easy to determine.
This strange affection probably was occasioned by that desiderium, those
tender maternal feelings, which the loss of her kittens had awakened in
her breast; and by the complacency and ease she derived to herself from
the procuring her teats to be drawn, which were too much distended with
milk, till, from habit, she became as much delighted with this foundling
as if it had been her real offspring.
This incident is no bad solution of that strange circumstance which grave
historians as well as the poets assert, of exposed children being
sometimes nurtured by female wild beasts that probably had lost their
young. For it is not one whit more marvellous that Romulus and Remus, in
their infant state, should be nursed by a she-wolf, than that a poor
little sucking leveret should be fostered and cherished by a bloody
grimalkin.
" . . . viridi foetam Mavortis in antro
Procubuisse lupam: geminos huic ubera circum
Ludere pendentes pueros, et lambere matrem
Impavidos: illam tereti cervice reflexam
Mulcere alternos, et corpora fingere lingua."