Half the summer passed before he tired of these diversions. The coming of the sparrows put an end to them. They came just as the corn-ears had commenced to harden. There must have been a thousand. They were not in the field all day, but, while they were there, life was not worth living. Picture it to yourself. A thousand unkempt, shrieking hooligans, plucking at the corn-ears, flinging the milky grain aside half eaten, filling the air with the whirring of their wings as they sighted man a hundred yards away, back again as man departed, quarrelling incessantly, blatant, noisy, vulgar. The cornstalks were no place for mice while sparrows were about.



But the evil had been of short duration. A month had seen the end of it. During that month the ways of the mouse were humble. He wandered in and out the undergrowth, feeding on what the sparrows had discarded. Not that he was really afraid of them. Had they cared to eat him, they assuredly would have done so at the start. But they never missed the opportunity of making him jump, and involuntary jumping is always unpleasant.

However, the life below had its compensations. He would certainly have lost her in the waving maze above. As it was, he saw her at the end of a straight avenue, and he could more or less mark her direction. She was running at full speed, as dainty a little harvest mouse as ever crossed a cornfield.



Her coat was of the softest fawn-chestnut; sharply contrasted with her pure white front, and twisted in a dainty curve to match her features. Her feet and tiny claws were the pink of a sea-shell. Her eyes were small (harvest mice have small eyes), but they were very gentle. As she sighted him, she swung lightly up a thistle stem, and sat for a moment balanced on the head. Evidently he was not altogether uninteresting.



* * * * *

Far into the evening he pressed his suit. When the inevitable rival mouse appeared, half the sun's disk was already masked by the hedgerow. Ungainly, straggling shadows spread across the field, dark bars across a lurid crimson ground. Never was finer mise-en-scene for such a conflict. They fought on the very summits of the stalks, and the sun just managed to see the finish.

* * * * *



They built the nest together. It was his part to bite the long ribbon leaves from their sockets, hers to soften them and knot them and plait them until they formed a neat, compact, and self-coherent sphere.

Nine cornstalks formed the scaffolding. Six inches from the ground she built between them a fragile grass-blade platform. Then she started on the nest itself. Her only tools were her fore-paws, tail, and teeth. The latter she employed to soften stiff material. The weaving she did from below upwards by pure dexterity of hand and tail. For six hours she worked indefatigably, and in six hours it was finished. But it was not meant to live in; it was merely a nursery. All day long the happy pair enjoyed each other's company aloft, leaping from corn-ear to thistle-head, from thistle-head to poppy, and back again to corn-ear, feasting, frivolling, stalking bluebottles. Their life was one long revel in the sunshine; for the harvest mouse has this distinction also, that, like a Christian, he loves the blue of the sky and sleeps at night.



But he is wise in his generation, and lives far from the haunts of men. You must be quieter than a mouse if you want to see him.



At night they lived in a tiny burrow, a foot below the surface of the ground. They had no claim to it, but they had found it empty. Empty burrows belong to the first mouse that comes along.

Once only did they stay above the surface after sundown. For an hour they enjoyed the novel sensation. Then the long-drawn wail of the brown owl drove them below in haste.

Perhaps they realized that prey on the surface is the owl's ideal. It is also the hawk's. But, where under-keepers are armed with guns, the night-bird has the better prospects. Both would have their wings clear as they strike. The owl's great chance comes when the corn is "stitched" in shocks of ten. Then he quarters the stubble, and nothing clear of shelter escapes him.

So the summer had passed—the perfect summer that comes once in a century. Day after day the sun had blazed through a cloudless sky; night after night the dews had fallen and refreshed the earth. The young mice, though pink, as yet, about the nose and waistcoat, were as promising as young mice could be. Everything was altogether and completely satisfactory.



So, as the western sky crimsoned and the shadow of each cornstalk gleamed like copper on its neighbour, the harvest mouse stole down from his eminence and sought his burrow, for, as I have said before, the nest was only a nursery.

* * * * *

He was up betimes. He was a light sleeper, and half a noise of that kind would have roused him. It was clank and whirr and swish and rattle in one. At first it sounded from the far corner on the right; then it passed along the hedgerow, growing more and more menacing until it seemed to be within a yard of him. Then it shrank away to nothing on the left, ceased for a moment, and, in obedience to human shouting, commenced afresh. So from corner to corner, crescendo and diminuendo. The harvest mouse was in the very centre of a square field.



When the sound seemed at its greatest distance, he climbed between two towering stalks and strained his eyes in its direction. He could not see for more than twenty yards before him. The world beyond was wrapt in soft white mist. Never had he seen anything so uncanny. Yet, had he been an early riser, he might have seen it often. Even as he watched it, it seemed to shrink away before the sunshine. The hedgerow loomed like a mountain-ridge before him. Down he slid, making a bee-line for the nest. That was all right; but his wife was evidently perturbed. Her mouth was full of grass-blades, and she was sealing every crevice on its surface. In five minutes he was up aloft once more. The whirring still continued, and now, through the lifting haze, he could distinguish its origin. Horses it was for certain, ay, and men—a small man sat upon the leading horse; but there was something behind these.

Had the harvest mouse ever seen a windmill, he would assuredly have concluded that a young one had escaped, and was walking in ever-narrowing circuits, round the field. The mist lifted further, and he saw the thing more clearly. Its great red arms swung dark against the sky, gathering the corn in a giant's grasp to feed its ravenous cutters. Round and round the field it went. Each time as it travelled to the distant corners the mouse dropped down to earth; each time as it thundered close at hand, he dashed like lightning up the stalk to look. Sometimes his wife came with him. Closer it drew and closer. Nor was the mouse the only thing that noticed it. All things that lived within the field, all things that loved its borders, were crowding in mad confusion to its centre.



First came the hare. His was a wild, blundering, panic-stricken stampede. He hurtled through the corn, crossing his fore feet at every second leap, his eyes starting backwards from his head, his ears pressed flat against his back. He passed the harvest mouse heading for the farther side, and the harvest mouse saw him no more, for he broke cover, trusting to his speed. Then, one by one, bewildered rabbits. Backwards and forwards they rushed. Now they sat up and listened; now they flung their white tails skywards, and vanished down some friendly seeming alley. In two minutes they were headed off.

Among the rabbits, of all things, a stoat! The mouse crept two grains higher when he saw him. He stole in and out the undergrowth with easy confidence, yet in some sense unstoatlike. The mouse looked down, and for a moment caught his eye—the most courageous eye in all the world. Something was very wrong indeed with the stoat—he never even bared his teeth.

Next, a flurried brood of nestling partridges, flattened to earth, and piping dismally to one another. Time after time they passed and repassed below him, until at last they were utterly weary, and crouched in a huddled mass together, with uplifted hunted eyes.

Then the rats and mice and voles. House-mice and wood-mice, red voles, and grey. Last of all, Berus the adder. Not a mouse stepped aside, as he worked his slow, sinuous length between the cornstalks. He, too, was of the hunted to-day.

Nearer and nearer drew the hoarse rattle of the reaper. More and more crowded were the few yards round the harvest mice. A large brown rat limped through, bleeding about the head. He had come in from the firing-line, and had incompletely dodged a stone. The stoat flung its head up as it scented him, but let him pass. He had never let a rat pass in his life before.

* * * * *

Only a square of forty yards remained, packed from end to end with desperate field-folk. Each prepared for its last stand in different fashion.



The rat selected a stout thistle-clump, planted his back against it, and sat back on his haunches. Berus the adder made a flattened spiral of his coils, and raised his head a trifle off the ground, ready to fling his whole weight forward from the tail. The pheasant chicks ceased piping, and lay still as death. The red voles and wood-mice dashed aimlessly to and fro. The stump-tailed voles trusted to the ludicrous cover of the broken ground. The stoat arched his back and bared his teeth to the gums. But the harvest mice sat on the top of the stalk and awaited events, to all seeming unmoved. Perhaps they were too small to be frightened. They were certainly too small to be confident. Yet, as things turned out, the top of the stalk was the safest place of all. Swish went the cutter. The nest was scattered to fragments before their eyes, and the rush began.

The rabbits started it. They flattened their ears, shut their eyes, and made a blind dash for the open. Not a rabbit escaped, for there were dogs. The rats fared no better; they held their ground to the last, and were mercilessly bludgeoned. The partridges were cut to pieces. Most of the mice and voles shared their fate. The stoat died game. He charged one yokel and routed him. Then he was set upon by three with sticks. In the open the stoat is no match for three with sticks.

Berus the adder lay still in a hollow. The cutter passed completely over him. He was always ready, but his earth-colour saved him the necessity of striking. As the evening shadows lengthened, he stole grimly from his shelter, crossed the field, climbed the slope, and regained his furze-bush.



And the harvest mice? The mother-mouse dashed to her nest as she saw it falling, and a wheel of the reaper passed over her. The father-mouse was saved, but through no merit of his own. Until the reaper was actually upon him, he clung to his stalk with tail and eighteen toes. Then it was too late to leave go. The great red arms gathered his stalk in the midst of a hundred others, swept the whole on to the knives, and dropped them on the travelling canvas platform. Up he went, and down again. For a moment he thought that he was being stifled. His eyes started from their sockets. His ribs seemed to crumple within him—fortunately they were elastic, as ribs no thicker than a stout hair must be. Then the pressure relaxed. The automatic binding was complete, and one more sheaf fell with a thud to earth. In that sheaf was the harvest mouse, bruised but alive, a prisoner in the dark. The stalks pressed tight against his body; but for the pitchfork he could never have got out.

The pitchfork shot through the middle of the mass, and missed him by half an inch. Once more he felt his surroundings flying upwards, but this time they fell more lightly. They formed the outside of a stitch of ten. As the fork was withdrawn the binding of the sheaf was loosened. He could breathe with comfort, and he could also see. He peered out, and found the whole face of Nature changed. The waving cornfield had gone. In its place was a razed expanse of stubble. The corn-sheaves stretched in serried piles across it. The harvesting had been neatly timed. Behind the hedge was the crimson glow of sunset. After all, that had not changed.

For an hour he waited within the sheaf, dubious and uncertain. Then he stole from his shelter. Within five yards he found her, gripping the shattered fragments of the nest. Close by lay a bludgeoned rat, and, five yards farther on, there sat a living one. It had its back to him, but by its movements he could see that it was feeding.

The field was flooded with moonlight. On all sides resounded the ominous hum of beetles' wings. Nature had summoned her burying squad. They had their work cut out, and blundered down from every quarter. For death had been very busy, and it was not the death that needs seeking out. About the centre of the field the ground was stained with smears of half-dried blood. So the beetles came in their thousands, and before morning broke their task was done.

But the harvest mouse did not wait till the morning. The fragments of his nest were empty, and he dared not look to see what the rat was eating.

He reached the sheaf-pile only just in time, for the brown owl was still abroad, quartering the field with deadly certainty of purpose. As he crept beneath it, he heard the brown rat scream.

His was the last sheaf to be piled, it was also the last sheaf to be lifted. It travelled to the stack on the summit of the last load, and, by a happy chance, formed one of the outside layer. By scratching and gnawing continuously for an hour, he worked his way to the butt of it, paused for a moment on the precipitous steep, and then scrambled lightly down to earth. A perpendicular descent was nothing to him.

The foundations of the stack were already tenanted. Some of the inmates had been, like himself, conveyed in sheaves, but more had rushed for shelter across the bared expanse, which, on all previous nights, had been a cornfield. There were mice of all kinds, there were half a dozen rats. Before a week had passed, like had joined like. The rats were undisputed masters of the basement; midway lived the common, vulgar mice; and, highest of all, as befitted them, for they only could thread the interstices of the upper sheaves, and they only had prehensile tails, the harvest mice.



THE TRIVIAL FORTUNES OF MOLGE

It was a bubble that launched him into a practical existence. They were rising by hundreds from the ooze that cloaked the bottom of the ditch. The sunshine called them up and scattered them into nothingness as they appeared. It was merely by chance that one, in its upward rush, hit his envelope of starwort; it was merely by chance that the envelope needed no greater stimulus to burst asunder.

Yet he was arranged to take advantage of the smallest jar. Like any other newt, he had started life as a small white rounded egg; for ten days he had remained, to all outward appearance, the same; cunningly enfolded, neatly glued down, but still an egg. Then the temperature rose, and he changed from sphere to cylinder, from cylinder to clumsy crescent, from crescent to watchspring. The core of the watchspring was his head, the extremity his tail, and, when the bubble touched him, he flicked out like the works of a Waterbury. His first colour sensation was the green of thick glass. As he sank, it grew dimmer and dirtier and browner, and presently, as he reached the ooze, it was blotted out.



He was straight, but unlovely—nothing but two black lines and three dots, cased in a filament of jelly. The lines were destined for his backbone and stomach; the dots for his eyes and mouth. The latter was ready for immediate work, given only the impulse. As he sank slowly, head downwards, the impulse was supplied. Out from his neck there floated two sprays of gossamer network, of such delicate texture, such dainty tracery, that nothing but the gentle laving of water could have unravelled them and left them whole. Through them the water flowed, and with it came the dim consciousness of individual life, the dim instinct of self-preservation. As he touched the bottom, the middle dot resolved itself into a sucker.

Fortunately his tastes were vegetarian and indiscriminate. For three days he contentedly sucked in his slush surroundings, and, in that time, the two outer dots bedecked themselves with rings of burnished copper. He could breathe, he could eat, he could see.

On the fourth day he could move. The black lines had also played their part. Both had intensified, but not equally. The uppermost had outstripped its fellow. For half its length it now ran alone, tapering to its end and carrying with it a ribbon envelope, transparent and invisible as glass.

Its use he learnt by grim experience. When first he moved it, it drove him headlong into inky darkness. His gills crumpled in the rough embrace of the mud, and his eyes and sucker were choked with slime. It was only a desperate, convulsive, aimless wriggle that freed him. The next time he cleared his immediate surroundings, and shot a full six inches upwards, only to sink slowly to the ooze again, motionless, and exhausted. He had described an elegant parabola.

Day by day his excursions grew longer and higher. Nor were they without adventure. Sometimes he would be caught in the wake of a stickleback, and would reach the bottom spinning, or on his back. He was lucky to reach it at all. Sometimes a sunbeam's dazzling radiance would check him in mid-career, and his callow eyes would take an hour to recover. It was a month before his eyelids developed. Sometimes he would collide with others of his own kind, equally unskilled in steering, and sometimes a vague quiver in the water caused him instinctively to mimic death, and thus avoid death in reality.

In a week's time he had grown out of all knowledge. To be accurate, he had doubled in size. But, even then, it was only the copper gleam of his eyes that saved him from utter insignificance. The remainder of him, for the most part of jelly transparency, was invisible against his sombre surroundings. His sucker had taken the semblance of a mouth, his gills were longer and more feathery, the curves of his tail were more shapely, but still he was, as yet, the merest apology for a tadpole, and so he remained until his limbs grew. They came in front at first—froggy's come behind, he wants them to swim with—the most curious spindle-shanks of arms that can be imagined, with elbows always flexed, and fingers always stretched apart. In due course his legs followed, of like purpose and absurdity. For swimming he only used his tail, but for balancing and steering, his feet and hands. Would he rise to the surface, he must flick his tail, and turn his toes and fingers upwards. Would he seek the bottom, he must depress them. Would he lie motionless, suspended in mid-water, he must point them straight outwards from his sides.



It was the charm of a free-swimming existence that divorced him from a vegetarian diet. To be continually sucking in plant sludge was a low grubby business at the best. Besides, he was now furnished with a respectable pair of jaws, not to mention the rudiments of teeth. Daphne was his first victim. Daphne sounds somehow floral, but this Daphne was equipped with one eye and several pairs of legs, and practised abrupt jumpy flights through the water. In short, she was a branchiopod, to be vulgarly precise, a water-flea. The succulence of Daphne led to experiments on Cyclops—Cyclops is her first cousin—and the taste, once acquired, never left him.

It was in the pursuit of this latter that he lost a leg, and thus realized that the problems of existence before him were twofold: he must not only eat, he must avoid being eaten. It was probably a stickleback that took his leg. A more powerful enemy would have taken the whole of him. So intent was he on his quarry that he scarcely realized the severance until he found himself swimming in an aimless lopsided circle. Then he sought the friendly shelter of the weeds, and sat still to ruminate. The leg was undoubtedly gone—his right hind leg—it was nipped off close to his body. He felt no pain, but, the moment he left his support, he realized that he was at a great disadvantage. The more studied his efforts to progress straight, the more certainly abnormal was his course. In letting himself sink slowly to the bottom he showed prudence. It was only at the bottom that he was likely to escape notice.

He stayed there for a succession of days, getting hungrier and hungrier, for it was only the smallest fry that came within his reach. It was lucky for him that his gills lasted out. It was a full month before a new leg commenced to fill the vacancy, and, by that time, they had shrunk from feathery exuberance to two ugly stunted tufts. It was the most painful period in his whole career. Every day his breathing grew more laboured. Instinct told him to seek the surface, but, each time he made the effort, he capsized before half the distance was accomplished. In six weeks' time came relief. He had not yet secured a new leg, but the growing stump fulfilled its purpose. He reached, by strenuous efforts, the surface of the water, opened his mouth and breathed the air.



But for his unfortunate accident, it is probable that the transformation from a water-breathing to an air-breathing animal would have accomplished itself imperceptibly. It is likely indeed, that, for a short period, while his gills were decrepit, and his lungs infantile, he might have breathed air and water alternately and at will. Now, however, his gills were, for all practical purposes, useless; his lungs, ready but unpractised. The necessity of air-breathing was forced on him at a moment's notice.

Small wonder that he commenced by overdoing matters. To begin with he distended himself so that he could not sink at all. Then he sank with far too small a reserve, and struggled to the surface spluttering and half-drowned. It was only after much tribulation that he adjusted matters to a nicety, diving with just sufficient air-supply to last his purpose, and emerging at the proper moment. A silver bubble, the waste product of his life, marked his downgoings and uprisings.

What made him quit the water altogether? For days he had lain half-submerged on a mass of starwort, his limbs idly anchored off his body, his quaint, puckered face and goggle eyes fixed immovably on infinity. He was, to all appearance, carved in stone when the impulse took him; and then—it was as if the swimming instinct had left him—he commenced to crawl across the natural bridge of pond-weed to the bank. Nor can I tell you where he went. Sometimes you may meet his kind in dark, damp corners, wedged between stones, or in the crannies of fallen tree trunks. Sometimes it is the gardener that brings word of him. "A' dug the spade a fut deep and turned he up, the poisonous effet, a' soon stamped on he!" Sometimes it is the housemaid. "Please m'm there's lizards in the cellar, I dursn't go near." Sometimes a halfpenny head-line. "Can Life be Indefinitely Prolonged? Startling Discovery in a Lump of Coal." But, wherever he may have got to, I can assure you of this, that for three whole years he stayed there and never willingly saw the light of day. Nature looked after him in his seclusion, Nature brought him such food as he required, and Nature never forgot him, but guided him back in due course to the brook in which he first saw light.

* * * * *

He was a dingy object from above. His eyes, it is true, had kept their tadpole lustre, but his coat had darkened to a dusky olive, and the only vivid colour about him, his orange waistcoat, was invisible as he crawled.

Even if it had been visible it would not have been to his disadvantage. Of all the colours in Nature there are none more warning than contrasted black and orange. Show me a creature of this colour combination, and you will show me something that is dangerous or nauseous or poisonous. It was this, perhaps, that was his salvation as he crawled from his land retreat back to the water he had left three years before. Perhaps it was simply his insignificance, for the journey was made by night, and he was crawling in and out of thickly twisted grass stems. Perhaps, though, it was his appearance, which, I will freely admit, was at this time, repulsive. A low set ridge along the centre of his back, and a faint violet tinge upon his sides were all that told of the glory that was to be.



He glided into the water slowly, and, as it were, ashamed. But he need not have been. In three years' seclusion he had swelled to fair proportions. He was no longer of necessity the hunted, in most cases now he was to be the hunter. As his head parted the surface, myriads of frightened atoms fled panic-stricken before him. Each lash of his tail scattered a microscopic community, and, as he progressed, the sense of mastery grew upon him. Food was here, and in plenty. He had only to open his mouth and take his fill. Yet he had no appetite. For the first few days of his water existence he sat amid the weed, rising only at rare intervals to the surface for air, and eating nothing. He was feeling the sudden change. His skin was tense and drawn all over, so tense, indeed, that each time he opened his mouth he felt the strain of it. Nor was the discomfort in his mouth alone. His coat was stretched to bursting-point along his back; his limbs seemed cased in gloves a size too small. A crawl ashore brought no immediate relief, but helped him indirectly. As he brushed between two grass stems, the skin of his lips split asunder, and, when he entered the water again, that friendly element gently forced its way into the gap. Every forward movement that he made now eased his old worn skin a little backwards.



First his head came free, and its old covering lay in tattered rags upon his neck. He pulled his hands out next, leaving their casing as the fingers of a turned glove. Next came his body's turn, for this he had to squeeze himself between the weed-stalks. Lastly, he cleared his legs and tail.

His old skin hung before him on the starwort, white-gleaming and transparent, a perfect, neatly folded model of himself. Of himself, did I say? It scarcely did his present splendour justice. Along his back now rose the budding undulations of a crest. His flanks had lost their sombre olive shade, and were suffused with mottlings of velvet black, mottlings that turned to purple as they crept across his orange front.



Even these beauties paled before his tail—a ribbon whose jet black centre shaded into violet, and whose edges were flushed with crimson.



Had he not been consumed with hunger, he might well have lingered in complacent admiration of himself. But hunger such as he had never felt before rose superior to his aesthetic sense, and he left his weed-shelter in ravenous haste.

He had not far to go—a swim of ten yards, and he was among the tadpoles.

They were in a patch of sunlight, lazily browsing on the starwort, mild as any sheep, with foolish, staring eyes, gaping suckers, and bodies that gleamed as if sprinkled with gold dust. For three days he settled in their neighbourhood, growing each day sleeker and more gorgeous. His orange waistcoat took a warmer hue, the crimson deepened on his tail and tipped the summits of his festooned crest. In six days' time he was a very perfect newt, decked and caparisoned for love or war. The very sticklebacks fought shy of him. One, it is true, charged him with spines erect—he had a nest to guard and would have charged a pike—but even he, for all his burnished panoply of emerald and vermilion, shrank back and bristled defiance from a safe distance. As for the shoal, they scattered in flashing rainbow-tinted disarray at his approach.

He was master of his surroundings, but there came a time when tadpoles palled upon him. For one thing, they were becoming daily more bony. Those with hind legs developed were difficult to swallow; those with front legs also were hopeless. A change of diet was imperative, and, in seeking for this, he came into collision with the water-spider.



Now, the water-spider lived by himself in a bubble of his own making. His legs were stout and long and hairy, his countenance was horrible, and his bite a thing to be avoided. When the newt first saw him he was devouring a caddis-worm. Vanity had been the worm's undoing. Instead of casing itself with tiny sticks and pebbles and sojourning at the bottom, as Nature ordained, it had put on a gaudy livery of starwort leaves. Trusting to this elegant protective mimicry, it boldly sought the surface. The disguise availed it nothing. The spider drove its fangs through the flimsy covering that but half concealed its head. The newt had seen it all. The bunch of animated foliage carelessly advancing, the spider's leap from its bubble, the glint of its shears as they met in the wretched creature's neck, the ghastly quivering tremor of the case. Then the fierce eight-legged efforts to extract the victim, and finally the awful cunning that seemed intelligent of Nature's devices, and pulled it out, as any angler would, tail foremost.



It was not so much animus against the spider as a longing for the worm that brought about the conflict. For the newt to snap at it was certainly unpardonable. Had he anticipated the resultant display of force, he would have hesitated. He had judged the spider solely by his size. When he felt six legs firmly fixed about his face, when he felt the cunning leverage of two more added to the pull, and a hideous pair of jaws drawing closer and closer, he dropped the worm, a useless martyr in Nature's scheme, and bit for freedom. The spider lost a foot, but left its mark, and the spider's hairy foot was not worth eating.



In his next robbery he was more judicious. He snatched an infant dragon-fly from the jaws of the water-scorpion, devoured it with pleasure, and then turned his attention to the water-scorpion himself. He found him flat and tasteless. The water-boatman was more succulent, but, with only one soft spot, difficult to do justice to. It was the same with all the larger creatures. He was reduced to stickleback fry, small larvae, and even juveniles of his own race. But nothing touched the tadpole, whose unkind destiny it is to furnish half the water-world with food. Had it not been for a diversion, he would have left the water in disgust.



* * * * *

Probably it was a case of mutual attraction. He swung his tail and crest before her, comeliest and most debonair of all her suitors; and she, with an engaging smile, swung a responsive tail at him. Crest she had none, and, of course, her tail could not compare with his in beauty. The higher we get in the natural orders, the more distinctly does decoration become a feminine necessity. Her coat was a pale olive green; her front light orange. Her charm was in herself.



For newts they made an excellent and well-matched pair. Of course they had their disagreements. Newts are by nature fickle and inconstant.

When she was occupied with the cares of a family, and spent her days and nights in deftly fashioning starwort cradles for her eggs, it was irritating that he, whose duty it was to frighten the marauding sticklebacks, should have preferred to rush away into the giddy vortex of newt society. It was more than irritating when, by way of showing that her cradles were insecure, he opened six and devoured the contents himself.

She profited by the experience, however, and the next series were exquisitely finished. The egg was placed in the exact centre of the leaf, the leaf was folded over, and sealed, tip to base, with all the strength of her hind feet. Her mouth put the finishing touch.

When she had visited some half-dozen stalks, and left each adorned throughout its length with a neat series of symmetrical bows, she felt that her task was done and that she was at liberty to accompany him. Together they learnt the brook from end to end. Sometimes they walked along the bottom, stirring to right and left of them a host of low-class life, slimy leeches, dingy crustaceans of every imaginable kind. Sometimes they traversed the middle deeps, brushing against the beetles and the boatmen and the water-snails. Sometimes they sunned themselves on the surface, snapping idly at the measurers and whirligigs.

It was the flood that parted them. For three days it had rained unceasingly on the surface of the brook. As they rose to breathe, their noses were lashed by pigmy waves. Each raindrop made its own widening eddy, its own pattering sound. Rain on the roof is noisy enough to those beneath, but rain on the water is deafening.



In the brook, as I have said, it rained for three days. In one part or another of the valley it rained for a week. The meadow-land gave its surplus to the brook, and the brook sought the river for relief. But the river was already filled to overflowing, so that brook and river met each other halfway, and the life in each was intermingled.



Now, between brook-life and river-life there is a great gulf fixed. There is no sideways in the river. All things that would stay at rest obey the current. The fishes point their noses against it; the plants lie as it guides them. Up or down is the law of quiet existence. The newt knew nothing of this, and, when a rush of waters swept him into the river-bed his natural instinct was to seek the bank. This laid him broadside and helpless. A roach snapped idly at him as he floundered past the shoal. The snap cost him his tail, and was probably his salvation. Without a tail his biteable area was halved. A young trout missed him, and he pulled up amid the lamperns in the shallows. The lamperns were too busily engrossed to notice him. Each was fast anchored by its sucker to a rounded pebble. Across their slender undulating bodies he struggled to the shore, battered, bruised, and tailless, but alive. He entered the first brook he came to, and there he remained a month in gloomy solitude, for he felt that his chief glory had been taken from him. In a month's time his tail had partially repaired itself. The new portion was stubby and colourless. In another fortnight his crest had shrunk to half its former size. This blow decided him. He left the water definitely. Where he went I cannot tell you, nor do I know what happened to her, but I think they will meet next year, and by that time his tail will be as beautiful as ever.



THE PASSING OF THE BLACK RAT

(NOTE.—The old English black rat, for some three hundred years predominant in this country, is now well-nigh extinct. He has been superseded, some think exterminated, by the brown Hanoverian rat, a more powerful and disreputable species, which made its appearance in the course of the eighteenth century.)

The black rat sat back on his haunches, pricked up his ears, and listened. It was something different to the faint lapping wash of the sewer; different to the dull hum of the traffic. It was an uncanny, unfamiliar scratching.

Every rat knows the scratching of his relations; but the black rat had no relations.

Six weeks ago there had been at least two others of his kind in existence—the one he had fought with, and the one he had most unsuccessfully fought for. As a matter of fact, he had crawled away from that encounter to die. Instead of dying, he had recovered. That his rival was in reality the better rat he could not allow. Position is everything in the rat duello, and position had not favoured him.

After a series of disastrous frontal attacks, he had limped behind the old corn-bin, with half his mouth torn away, and his front paws mangled and useless. He had bowed his head and waited sullenly for the coup de grace. But the coup de grace never came. There had been a diversion in the rear, and into the cause of that diversion he had not troubled to inquire.

He had seen neither him nor her since, and, until he had recovered from his wounds, had hardly felt his loneliness. For a wounded rat, loneliness is normal and necessary. Of late, as he sniffed dubiously round the old familiar corners, the sense of desolation had forced itself upon him.

He recalled, dimly, the few weeks before his misfortune. Every day the number of the tribe had lessened. First went the patriarch, white about the muzzle, grizzled all over, tottering and feeble, but still of eminent distinction—the black rat does not coarsen with age—then, one by one, with fearless inconsequence, the younger ones; lastly, save two, his own contemporaries.

* * * * *

The scratching seemed to get louder. The black rat glided, like a shadow, towards it. It sounded from the bottom of the door.



Three sides of the cellar—for a hundred years the cellar had been the rats' stronghold—were solid masonry. The fourth side was a wooden partition. At one corner of this stood the door, close-fitted to its sill and frame, and shrouded in cobwebs, which, in rats' memory, had never parted. Along the wall opposite ran a six-inch shelf, and, at the extremity of this shelf, where the fittings entered the brickwork, was the entrance of the run.

Generations of rats had used that run. Its sides were smooth and polished as a metal tube. Here it was narrower, there wider, but throughout its length it was free and unimpeded.

For the most part it lay between wall and wainscot. At times it seemed to pierce the masonry itself. Midway in the ascent the path of least resistance had been towards the outer wall. Two round holes pierced its surface—a brick's length dividing them. One can understand the making of the first hole, but the making of the second? Fifteen feet below resounded the busy traffic of the city. Did two tunnels converge by chance? did they converge by design? or was the second made by some colossal rat, stretched at full length, and trusting his life to his superhuman hearing? I can only state the facts. I do not pretend to explain them.

From the second hole the run passed into the masonry once more, zigzagged upwards into the storeroom, and ended.

From the storeroom there were countless exists—down the gutter into the courtyard (a short cut to the shambles), beneath the flooring to the scullery, and thence along the drain-pipe to the great sewer, through the ventilator on to the roof—anywhere, everywhere.

* * * * *

The scratching was certainly louder. The black rat was stepping very delicately, but a slippery corn-husk shot from underneath his foot, and with the rustle of the corn-husk the scratching ceased.

Nothing but a rat could have heard that; it was certainly a rat, but who?

For ten minutes he waited, listening. Then he stole forward, until the points of his whiskers brushed lightly against the door. Instantly there was a movement on the far side—a four-footed movement. Caution against such cunning seemed superfluous. He boldly forced his nose between door and flooring and sniffed; but only for a second, for his nose had gone farther than he meant; the bottom of the woodwork had been gnawed through until it was a bare half-inch thick all along its length. He drew back with a jerk, and waited another ten minutes, staring at the door and thinking.

The silence on the far side grew unendurable. The black rat whisked round, and rushed madly for the run. He gained the shelf by a beautiful swinging leap, easy and silent as a cat's.



For the first few yards, between brickwork and wainscot, the run was clear enough; but, as it turned upwards to the floor above, something seemed unfamiliar.

The light, which had always faintly shimmered from the hole in the outer wall, was gone. As he drove forward headlong, he bruised his nose against the cause of its disappearance. The wall had been repaired with concrete. It was utterly ungnawable, and he slowly retraced his steps to the cellar. He was just in time to hear the scratching recommence.



It drew closer and closer. It got upon his nerves. He tried to steady himself by nibbling at a stray corn-ear. He dropped it before he had fairly tasted it, and crept forward to the door once more. There was more than one unknown at work. At times a light quiver ran the whole length of the bottom ledge.

From a rat standpoint, it was the worst position conceivable. That attack was impending was certain; it was equally certain that retreat was impossible. Desperation, rather than bravado, determined him to reverse the positions. In one spot the wood had been fined to a quarter of an inch. Light filtered through, and cast a dull red shadow on the floor. It was at that spot that he flung himself. As he touched it, every other sound ceased. He had the field to himself, and he worked it to the best of his ability. The splinters flew before his chisel teeth; he wrenched, and scratched, and tore. Before five minutes were gone, the flimsy wooden screen had been transformed into a neat three-cornered hole.

He thrust his head forward, and stared with all his eyes. At first he could distinguish nothing. The far side of the partition was, in comparison with his recent surroundings, brilliantly lighted. Gradually the form of the enemy shaped itself before him. It was certainly a rat, but what a rat! Until his muzzle had shot through the opening, it had been facing him, waiting and watching. Now it had leapt backwards, and presented a three-quarter rear view.



It was the most vulgar, ill-conditioned beast he had ever set eyes on. Its muzzle was coarse and blunted; its ears were half concealed in coarse-grained, unkempt hair; its tail, instead of tapering, like his own, to an elegant infinity, was short and stumpy; its eyes were, to say the least of it, insignificant. But its colour! a dirty, nondescript, khaki brown!

The sight of it was enough, and he drove at it full tilt.

Appearances were undoubtedly against the brown rat, but it knew something of tactics. With a lightness, such as one could hardly have expected, it swung to one side, and, before his brilliant charge could take effect, had got its back to the wall. He had made the same mistake again—the mistake of brainless breeding all the world over. It mattered not whether he approached from front, or right, or left, the same whirling flail of fore-paws was ready for him. He leapt clean over its head, and was flung back—by the brickwork. Whichever way he tried he had only half a foe to aim at. Still he never flinched, happy in the conviction that blood must tell.

Blood might have told against a single enemy. Against a score it availed little. And a full score were advancing. The ungainly, stubby forms seemed to rise from every crevice in the floor.

They came very slowly at first—a dirty cohort of khaki Hanoverians; their muzzles uplifted and quivering at the scent of blood, their beady eyes fixed seemingly on vacancy, but really on himself. He felt them coming, and, for a moment, paused in his attack. The whole group might, save for the restless nostrils, have been carved in stone; the duellists eyeing each other warily, the scavenger ring waiting on events; but the whiskers of each one trembled, and gave the whole group life.

It was the watchman's tread that broke the spell. The black rat knew that tread well enough. He knew every tread in the warehouse; but to the invaders it was unfamiliar. Before the footsteps had resounded twice, he was left alone; the host had vanished as quickly as it came.

The black rat retreated in good order, and established himself once more in a corner of the cellar. It was a mistake, but he wanted time to recover himself, and time to think.

Of the world on the far side of the partition he knew nothing, but he realized that there was a world. Should he make a rush for it before the enemy had regained courage? Even so, where should he rush to? Was he likely to find an exit amid altogether strange surroundings? Could he block the hole? Rats had done such things before now, but it was only deferring the evil hour, and what time would he have to do it in? The question was answered for him. The echo of the watchman's step had barely ceased, before the hole at the base of the door was, for a moment, obscured.

They came in jerky disorder. First a young, loose-limbed stripling. He was barely out before he was back again, throwing up the pink soles of his hind feet, and flicking the woodwork with his belated tail. Then a kaleidoscopic succession of suspicious faces. The light danced on the floor as each thrust his neighbour aside, thrust his head like lightning through the opening, and as quickly withdrew it. They were masters of scouting, these brown barbarians. Sometimes one, bolder or younger than the rest, would steal a foot within the cellar. Sometimes, for minutes together, all would be quiet, the light patch on the floor the only thing amiss. The black rat never moved his eyes from that light.

It was an hour before the chieftain himself appeared. He squeezed through the opening, but, for all his bulk, came quickly. Once clear, he dropped upon his haunches, and knit his fists before him. The position showed him at his best. Crouched or in motion, the clumsy angles of his body were forced into relief. As he sat back, the curves softened, and, as far as brown rat could be, he was imposing. For some moments he sat immovable, facing the darkness, then he turned, and, with one eye always fixed behind him, passed slowly out of sight.

There was a long silence after this. The light patch on the floor seemed to grow in intensity. By its dull reflection, the black rat could just distinguish his own whiskers. It fascinated him. He stole halfway across the floor towards it, and paused. As he paused, it was blotted out once more.



He was being watched. Before he was back in his corner, three of the enemy were through the breach. Five more followed. Then in quick confusion a dozen. Then a dozen more. The Hanoverian army was spreading its wings.

Their actual number he never knew. Perhaps, for the credit of his family, it was as well. Reflection would assuredly have put resistance, and even hope, out of the question. As it was, he came forward with absolute indifference. His breeding again stood him in good stead. Of all the host he was the least uneasy. In the middle of the floor he stopped abruptly, confronting the situation. Fifty rats were in the cellar now, and there was not a rustle among them.

He had calculated exactly where to stop. It was a foot beyond the normal take-off of the grown rat. He flung his head round, put all the force he possessed into his hind legs, and leapt, upwards and backwards, towards the shelf. He caught it with his fore-paws, scrambled on to it, and, for the moment, was safe. He was only just quick enough. As his eyes turned, the brown rats had rushed forward, and, even as he clutched the ledge, he heard them pattering against the wall.

The floor below was a raging sea of rats; rats leaping over one another, jostling, biting, tearing. To the silence of a moment before had succeeded a babel of shrieks and hisses. But there were no jumpers among them like himself. He passed quietly along the ledge above them, through the entrance of the run, and up to its blocked extremity. There he braced his back against the concrete and waited.

* * * * *

He waited for three days, his muzzle grounded, his eyes peering into the darkness, his every sense alert. He ate nothing, he drank nothing—to all appearance he never slept.

On the fourth day, he crept feebly halfway towards the cellar. Privation was beginning to tell on him. His only hope was that the invaders might have retired.

For the first few yards it almost seemed as if it was so. Neither in the air nor on the ground could he detect the slightest vibration; but, as he turned a sharp corner, the hope was dispelled. The whole run quivered with the stealthy whisper of rats' footsteps. Faint squeaks and whimperings echoed along it. The cellar was evidently still occupied in force; he was cornered between starvation and insuperable odds. Yet there might be a scrap of food this side of the cellar. He stole forward until another turn revealed the ledge. In the centre of the ledge were three brown rats. The farther one was cleaning itself, but the other two were feeding, and, at the sight of the food, he lost all prudence. He was upon them before he was perceived. The two dropped their provender, leapt blindly forward, and fell clumsily to the floor below, but the third slid down the junction of the walls.

The black rat realized what that meant. As he turned his head, he saw his retreat cut off. Two more had scaled the corner behind him. He swung about to face them, girded himself to charge, and, instead of charging, stopped dead.



For the first time in his life he knew what fear was. Before him were his immediate adversaries; his quick ears caught the crumbling of plaster behind him. Rats were mounting that corner also.

Five feet below lay the floor. Its surface glistened with shifting beads of light—light from rats' eyes.

He was between the devil and the deep sea—the floor was the sea, and the devil was assuredly advancing towards him. Never before had he set eyes on such a beast—ten inches from head to tail, brawny, misshapen, mangy, a veritable Caliban of rats.



The position was hopeless. All he could do was to die game. Caliban had crept within a foot of him, and was pulling himself into position. But he was too slow. Before he had raised his clumsy fore-paws from the ground, the black rat's teeth had met in his throat. His huge frame quivered for a moment, staggered, and lurched heavily off the shelf. He carried his comrade with him.

First blood! what matter whose? Caliban lay where he fell, his eyes slowly glazing. The eyes round him caught the reflection from his throat. He was the hero of a hundred fights, and the puniest ratling had its share. The floor was for the moment the centre of attraction.

Had it not been for the chieftain, the black rat might have regained the run. But the chieftain had foreseen events. As Caliban fell he had clambered up, and was now blocking the entrance.

He was grounded on his haunches, with uplifted paws, ready for anything. The black rat drove at him, and was hurled backwards. Among rats the chieftain is, of necessity, pluperfect master of defence. Again and again he parried the attack, until Caliban was disposed of.

Then, in the middle of his rush, the black rat heard once more the stealthy footstep in his rear, paused, half turned, missed his footing, and fell.

Yet he accounted for four of those below, which made five altogether.



"THE FOX'S TRICKS ARE MANY; ONE IS ENOUGH FOR THE URCHIN" (Old Greek Proverb).

Rain, and rain, and rain. For three days in succession the sun had defaulted. Yet he had been doing his best behind the storm-clouds. That very morning he had forced one straggling beam well through. It had been completely thrown away, for every living thing was snugly tucked up under cover. Now, as his time was getting short, he made one last despairing effort.

Westward, the sky was banked with purple nimbus, towering in gloomy magnificence aloft, but fined to nothingness on the horizon. The sun saw his chance, and took it. As the storm-cloud was borne a trifle upwards, he flashed his dying radiance beneath it.

At first the brightness was intolerable. The rain-drenched leaves were bathed in liquid fire; the river surface gleamed like molten metal; the undergrowth that fringed the bank became a tangled web of dazzling light-points.

The effort was of short duration, yet, before the sun had sunk, the things that loved the river had caught his message.



The cloud-bank lifted sullenly, and dispersed. Out of the east came a soft summer breeze, stealing silently across the valley, and tilting the balance of each dripping leaf. So the great drops of moisture slipped off them to swell the river, and the drying of the earth commenced.

That is what brought them all out together.

The water-rat came from a hole five feet above the river-level. An overhanging grass-tuft masked her exit. As a rule, she used the back way—a gently sloping tunnel which led from nest to stream. But to-night it was very still. She padded quietly to the water's edge, slid through the reeds that bordered it, and sat upon a silted crescent of mud that lay on their far side. She always sat there to commence with. From the bank she was invisible; up stream and down she could see for fifty yards, and the pith of the reed-stem, of all things in her menu most charming, lay ready to her orange-tinted teeth.

The noctules came from the hollow in the old chestnut. Twenty of them lived there together, because it was a convenient, roomy hollow. No one knows how it started—perhaps the wood-peckers could tell you—but rain had certainly finished its excavation. The entrance was some thirty feet above the ground—dank, noisome, and forbidding; the end was near the roots.

Of course the old chestnut was dying; but that did not concern the noctules. Each evening they crawled up to prove the weather; each evening, of late, they had shambled back again into the gloomy depths, cannoning awkwardly against each other, snarling and grumbling. The temper of bats is uncertain, and hunger does not improve it.

But to-night it was better. One by one the ghoulish muzzles emerged, peered into the darkness, and were satisfied; then the clumsy, ill-balanced bodies, entangled in loose-folded leathern cerements—the noctule's wing-spread measures a full foot; lastly, the webbed curving triangle of feet and tail.



Each, as it blundered free, clung, for a space, head downwards to the bark, then slacked the grip of its ten toes, unhooked its thumbs, dropped, and flew. Never was flight more graceful, never more perfectly controlled. For fear of the swallows, the summer beetles fly by choice at twilight; even then they must needs fly low, for the noctule never misses, and the crunch of his teeth in a beetle's horny back is all he knows of music.

The stoat came from a tree which was even more decrepit than the chestnut. It had been an elm once. For four centuries it had defied the elements, towering full fifty feet in rugged, imperial grandeur. The elements had outstayed it. All that remained was a caverned stump, whose jagged summit pointed, like an accusing finger, to the sky.

But, from a stoat standpoint, the stump was unsurpassable. There were three exits from the hollow base. Up the shaft there was yet another. Thick brambles fringed it on every side, and in those brambles were many birds' nests. The stump was an ideal nursery; as such the stoat had employed it. He had left to its friendly protection his family of six, with a young rabbit to keep them occupied. He, himself, was now in quest of frogs.

The hedgehog bore on his back clear tokens of his last retreat. A dozen withered leaves were clinging to his spines. The nearest pile of such lay heaped against the hen-house. The hedgehog footed through the knotgrass slowly, grubbing with his snout to right and left of him. Sometimes, when cover failed, he broke into a bow-legged run.

The squirrel came from high up in the beech tree—the second fork from the top. There he had built what he called a nest, but what humans, with greater nicety of diction, call a drey. Speak not of squirrel's "nest" to sportsmen; to speak of fox's "burrow" were hardly less heinous. The drey was eminently satisfactory, for, in the summer months, it was completely hidden. Yet three days inside it had been more than sufficient for the squirrel. He was cold, hungry, and cramped in every limb. To quicken the blood within him, he flung himself at lightning speed from bough to bough, from tree to tree, up and down the branches, in and out the maze of dripping foliage, until his every hair was tipped with a raindrop, and he was almost weary. Then he paused a moment for breath and shook himself, dog-fashion.

The mole's uneasy, crimson-pointed muzzle came from a hole right on the water's edge. He was feeling for the water. Last night the swollen river had forced its way a yard into his run, and he had blundered headlong into it. Swimming is easy to the mole, but swimming in an inch-wide tube is risky. So, to-night, he was cautious. It might have been fine all day, or it might have been wet, for all he knew.

The grass-snake seemed to come up from the river bottom. His head suddenly parted the water beneath the old pollard, and he swam slowly across the stream, craning his neck before him. The pollard was inwardly rotten to the core—a snug retreat for snakes, to which the only entrance was a water-way.

The dormouse came from halfway up the hazel, and the wood-mouse came from its roots. They, too, had been three days weather bound; but they were not hungry. Each had its winter store to draw upon.

The moths and caterpillars and beetles, came from everywhere—crannies in the brickwork, joints in the palings, crevices in the bark, from neat-rolled envelope of leaf, from hollowed shelter of reed-stem, from pigmy burrows in the ground.

* * * * *

It was the hedgehog who started it. The hedgehog has a keen sense of humour, and, for that reason, he loves an argument.

"I will back my spines," said he, "against any means of defence in the country." He curled himself into a forbidding spiky ball, and rolled slowly down the bank towards the water. On the very brink he stopped and uncurled himself. "Or any means of offence," he added.

This was too much.

"Spines!" sneered the stoat. "Spines might be some use if you had any pace behind them. Where would they come in against a hare?"



"Spines would be awkward in the shallows," murmured the water-rat, as she swam quietly over to the far shore, keeping half an eye on the stoat, who was also something of a swimmer.

"Spines!" squeaked the noctule from the safe height of a hundred feet. "Why load yourself with spines? Why not fly like me?"

"Spines!" shouted the squirrel. "A pretty mess you'd make of it with spines up here. Do you think every one spends their life grubbing after ground beetles?"

"Spines!" purred the moths. "We gave up spines at quite an early stage. Haven't you finished moulting, hedgehog?"

"Spines!" snapped the trout. "Give me a good set of fins."

Now this was exactly what the hedgehog had foreseen. As I have said before, he had a keen sense of humour.

"I am willing to hear you all," said he.

So, because of his pleistocene lineage, and because of his popularity (the comedian is always the more popular candidate), and because he had started the discussion, he was voted to the chair.



The noctule spoke first. He leant his arm against the roughened bark, hooked his thumb-nail into a crevice, and opened his mouth as though he would eat the world. He was not beautiful, and his voice was three octaves above F in alt. What reached the audience below was somewhat on these lines—

"I and my kin are the only mammals that fly. Therefore I am superior to the hedgehog. Flying is the best state of all. Even the humans do their poor best to fly. Every part of me is modified for flight. My knees bend the wrong way so as to better stretch my wing-membranes. My tail serves as a rudder, and in the hollow pouch about it I can trap a beetle, ay, and carry him where I will. My sense of touch is the most delicate in all the world. I never dash myself, like blundering bird, against a wire. If you would know the secret, look at the trembling bristles on my muzzle, look at the earlets within my ears, look at the sensitive wing-membrane between my fingers. No quiver in the air escapes me. I have the sixth sense of the blind, and yet I see."

Next spoke the stoat, the swash-buckler. He cleared his throat with a short, rasping bark, glared round him, and began—

"I am the only flesh-eater among you all," said he. The hedgehog's smile broadened, but he said nothing. "Therefore I have bigger game to tackle than any of you. Therefore I am better armed. Scores of bats I have eaten in my time. I could climb your chestnut if I cared to, noctule, and eat the colony. I would, if you were not so evil-smelling." (This from the stoat!) "Scores of water-rats have I eaten, too. Look at my long, lithe body. What burrow is too small for it? Look at my teeth. What rodent has a chance against them? I fear nothing, not even man himself. I can swim, I can run, I can climb, I can hunt by scent, and I am cunning as a fox. From my fur, when I am dead, comes the imperial ermine. Would you pit yourself against me, hedgehog?"



"I would," said the squirrel. Like the bats, he was some way off the ground; also he had mapped up a clear course of forty yards among the tree-tops, so he spoke recklessly. "The stoat is an amateur climber." ("Wait till I get to your nursery!" snarled the stoat.) "He has no idea of taking cover. A treed stoat against a human is doomed. Look at his black-smudged tail—only a trifle better than a weasel's. It reminds me of my summer moult—but it's worse; and, in the summer, even I must trust more to my hands and feet. I, the most skilful gymnast in the country, save only the marten, and there are too few of them to count. Give me my winter parachute, and see me then. Who can thread the woods like me? From end to end I fly, skimming the tree-tops and never touching ground. Yet, if the fancy takes me, I can cover land or water faster than any stoat. From my fur, when I am dead, comes the camel-hair brush."



Next came the dormouse. "Sleep is the best defence of all," he said. "Sleep and being very small indeed, and never coming out except after sundown, and having great big eyes, so that you can see things like stoats long before they see you. Offence I know nothing of, unless it's eating beetles."

After him the wood-mouse. "Give me a good burrow underground," said he. "Make it among branching roots, with half a dozen entrances and exits, and I defy the weasel, let alone the stoat. But in the winter, when cover is scanty, sleep and a store of nuts is best of all. Beans are no good—they rot away. Earth-stored nuts, tight packed, are the sweetest things I know."

"What of summer?" said the hedgehog.

"Weight for weight," said the mouse, "I can tackle anything that moves. As for voles and house-mice, I can fight two at once. When I am giving much away, I like my burrow handy."



"Who talks of burrows?" said the mole. "Where is there tunnel-builder like myself? Two fields away you can see my fortresses. You can see them plainly, tunnelled maze and rounded nest and all. Some prying human has turned his vacant mind to nature-study, and made a clumsy section of a pair. Look at each in turn. Mark the one tunnel that leads upward to the nest, mark the two galleries that surround it, mark that they wind in a spiral, and are not joined by shafts at intervals. That would so weaken the surroundings as to leave the nest an easy prey to scratching weasel. Why is the spiral made? To cheat inquiry; a dozen tunnels join it from the run; from it are a dozen exits to the surrounding field. One tunnel only leads into the nest. Only the moles know that one. Alone I did it, save for my wife, who hindered me. Alone I moved two hundredweight of earth. Nor do my qualities end here. Were I fifty times as big, I would be lord of creation. Where can you find fiercer courage than mine; where, bulk for bulk, more mighty strength? What monster, think you, would an elephant, built for burrowing, be? For my weight, I am the strongest thing that lives. One creature, and one only, approaches me; that is the mole-cricket. Let him speak for himself."



The mole-cricket turned up from nowhere in particular, and his voice was the tinkling of a silver bell. It would have taken a score of him to make a mole.

"I am older than the mole," he said, "yet from him I take my name. In dry ground I make poor progress; where it is muddy and swampy, I can run through it, like a fish through water. When the mole came into being, he borrowed the pattern of my fore feet—shovel and pick and spade in one. Like me, he learnt to run backwards or forwards, and that is why his hair has no set in it. Whichever way he goes, the clinging dust is swept from off its surface. He comes from grubby depths as polished as a pin. And so do I; but from a different cause. I am so highly polished that the damp soil cannot cleave to me."

"Burrowing," said the hedgehog, "is a low form of defence. What says the water-rat?"

"I burrow, too," said the water-rat. "If I have time, I burrow in the water. I part the surface with the tiniest ripple, keeping my fore feet close packed to my sides, and swim with hind legs only, below the surface, neatly as a natterjack. If I were better treated, I should never burrow in the banks at all. But I must have somewhere to go to when my breath fails me. I eat the mare's tail and the pith of reed-stems. That does no one any harm, not even a trout-preserver. But of all good viands, commend me to a parsnip."

"This is neither defence nor offence," said the hedgehog.

"The only offensive thing I have is a pair of incisors," said the water-rat. "They are orange-yellow and very strong. As regards defence, I can do more in the water than most."



"Not more than me," the young trout broke in. He flung his nose jauntily against the surface, and the surface swung from it in widening eddies, circle after circle. "I can be up to the weir and down again before you are halfway across the stream. When humans build their destroyers, they model them on me. I know that, because I have seen their clumsy models, trout-shaped, save the mark!"

"That is enough from any one of your years," said the hedgehog. "Little river-fishes run away from big river-fishes, and big river-fishes run away from bigger river-fishes, and they all run away from the otter."

The jack that lived in the deep below the pollard grinned, but said nothing. The jack knew better, but he never says anything. But the gudgeon and the troutling were terrified at the notion of bigger fishes, and made straight for the weeds.



"What think the caterpillars?" said the hedgehog.

The caterpillars were studying moral invisibility in a hundred different ways, for insect life is the most highly specialized of all. It was the lobster-moth-to-be that spoke first. He bent his head backwards until it touched his tail, folded the knee-joints of his skinny legs, and began—



"It is all bluff," said he, "caterpillars are past-masters of bluff. Look at the hawkmoths, fat, flabby, bloated things, with curly tails. Most of them fling their heads back, arch their necks, and play at being snakes. Some grow eyes upon them, not real eyes, but markings which serve as such, enough to scare the average chuckle-headed bird. Sometimes they trust to vein-markings on their bodies, which turn them into casual misshapen leaves. Sometimes they liken themselves to twigs—"

"That is what we do," cried the loopers. Each branch of the oak had its loopers, feeding cheerfully, transforming themselves to twigs, and shamming death in quick succession.



"Sometimes," continued the lobster-moth-to-be, "they are, like myself, really worth eating. Then, mere vulgar imitation bluff is of little avail. To be a withered leaf is my first line of defence; if the ichneumon buzzes nearer, I shift my ground and become a spider. I am the only caterpillar in the country with spider-legs; when they are stretched to their full length and quivering, they are worse to look at than the real thing. Should even this fail me, I show the imitation scar on my fourth body-ring. That usually clinches the matter. The ichneumon fondly imagines that I am already occupied. So, if I am lucky, I turn at length to dingy pupa, and thus preserve my race."



"Will you hear an amphibian?" said the toad. He came from the centre of a grass-tuft, and spoke with solemn deliberation. "Not one of you is more persecuted than I. From time immemorial I have been the loadstone of credulity, and—I am altogether defenceless. I am never worth eating, for the shock of capture opens every pore on my skin, drenching me with what the poets class as venom. So I am usually thrown aside with a broken back. For centuries I was thought to have a jewel in my head. How many of my hapless ancestors were tortured for that jewel! With the toad's death, the jewel was believed to vanish. How many have been 'larned to be a toad' by baffled, disappointed rustics! That is what puts the sad expression in my eye. How have I survived it all? By dogged perseverance. I lay so many eggs that one at least must survive. Thus is the balance of the race preserved. I myself was one of five hundred, the only one that reached maturity. Yet all were in the same long ribbon coil. The swan that gulped the coil, gulped all but me. I dropped into the brook alone, and there I quietly passed through my novitiate, egg to tadpole, tadpole to toadling, toadling to toad. When my tail was absorbed into my body, I sought a land-retreat. There I have spent my time for twenty years. None of you know it, and none ever will. I leave it only at twilight, and, as you pass, I shield my face with my fore feet. Froggin is much the same; nothing but his prolific quality saves him."



"Froggin is at least worth eating," said the grass-snake. He lay with all his four-foot length displayed in graceful sinuous curves, and was listened to in silence. Nothing loves a snake, however harmless. "With me, as with the caterpillars, it is mostly bluff. I can swing back my head, and flatten the nape of my neck, as well as any deadly adder. I can also strike, but there is no poison behind the blow. My only weapon of offence is smell, a sickening musty smell, that makes the enemy loose his hold. Once I am halfway down a hole, I'm safe. I set my ratchet scales against the sides, and nothing can dislodge me. Only a jerk is dangerous, and that must be accomplished before I am fairly fixed."



"I am armour-clad," said the stag-beetle. "Could there be better method of defence? Look at the sliding joints of my breastplate. Human skill has copied it, but never has surpassed it. My horns look formidable, but for offence are useless. They are far from my eyes, and move but slowly. Give me time, and I can crush a tender twig between them, and suck its juices. That is all the purpose they serve me, yet they look like branching antlers, and that also is something."

"I have heard you all," said the hedgehog. "I have heard the flier's point of view from the bat, the gymnast's point of view from the squirrel, the swimmer's point of view from the water-rat, and the assassin's point of view from the stoat." For a moment he coiled himself up with a snap, but the stoat made no remark, so he slowly uncoiled himself, and resumed. "Yet I maintain my original contention, there is nothing like spines. 'The fox's tricks are many; one is enough for the urchin.' What is the one unfailing, all-sufficing trick? The proper and judicious use of spines. All of you would use spines if you could. Most of you do. Think of the bramble-thickets, think of the furze, the last resort of valiant stoat and viper, think of the holly, where the sparrows roost.

"Spines are the proved asylum of the spineless. Nature has flung them broadcast. She starts low down among the plants, thorn and thistle, gorse and cactus. Then she turns to the sea-urchins and caterpillars and beetles, then she fashions the globe-fish and thorny devil-lizard, then she comes to the birds—spikes are their only weapons—lastly, in me and mine, she reaches the fulness of perfection.

"Think of the purposes spines serve me. Which of you defies the fox or terrier in the open? I leave the fliers out—running away is not defence. To me a fight is child's play. The more inquisitive my foe, the tighter do I clinch myself together. They get more harm than I do."

The last few words were spoken from within. The stoat approached gingerly, and turned the hedgehog over, seeking for a place to jump at. The bat wheeled across him, and swerved at the suspicion of those rigid spears. The caterpillars betook themselves once more to feeding. The water-rat slipped quietly down the stream,—she still feared the stoat. The squirrel ran openly down his tree-trunk, and secretly up the far side of it. The fear of the stoat was on him too. So the moon rose, and, for most, the chance of sport that night passed away.

The hedgehog remained coiled for an hour. Then he shambled away, well satisfied. First he eat two pheasant eggs, then a belated frog, and then a nestling blackbird. As the sun mounted the eastern sky he once more sought the pile of leaves that lay against the hen-house.

THE END



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