"The Hare and many friends" was the final fable in John Gay's first collection of 1727. It concerns the inconstancy of friendship as exemplified by a hare that lives on friendly terms with the farm animals. When the horns of the hunt are heard, it panics and eventually collapses, exhausted, begging each of his acquaintances to help him escape. All give him different excuses, the last being a "trotting calf" who bids him "Adieu" as the hunters burst onto the scene. The poem won widespread popularity for some 150 years afterwards but, on a prose version appearing in a collection of Aesop's Fables, Gay's original authorship has gradually become forgotten.