himself, that unspeakable serpent's hiss appeared to
sound in his very ear, and the deep sea, folding upon itself, made the
poor vole yell as if he had touched off a live-wire. He had not, of
course; but it was like being struck with a dozen pins at once. He
would have got out if he could, but to move was to discover more pins,
and he just had to keep where he was, squealing fit to burst.

And that saved the vole, probably.

Not that there was any magic or rubbish of that kind, of course. It
was simply that the viper, shooting his every inch round the corner in
the effort to grab the vole's hindlegs then or never, had hit, full
pelt and nose first, the nice little array of pointed arguments carried
on the back of the neck of a hedgehog, snuffing under the clod,
pig-fashion, for spiders. The hedgehog, whose phlegmatic disposition
and special armament allowed him the luxury of never being surprised at
anything, promptly and literally shut up, so that long before the viper
thing had unhooked his nose and was waving his forward part about over
the hedgehog, with murder in his eye and death behind his flickering
tongue, looking for a place to strike home, old hedgehog was rolled up,
and snuffling and snoring away inside there, like an old man chuckling
when he has just cried "Mate!" at chess.

This trying position continued for perhaps five minutes. It seemed
like five days to the wretched bank-vole.

Then the slow temper of the funny old hedgepig smoldered gradually
alight. His eyes grew red in the foxy head of him, his snout "worked,"
and he snuffled and grunted faster and faster. He made up his mind to
fight. And the extraordinary combat began. Lit by the blood rays of a
setting sun, from a sky all raw and red, backed by the blue-gray haze
of the watching woods, the silence broken only by the ghostly whisper
of the snake's scales and the tiny pig-like grunting of the
hundred-spiked hedgehog, that duel started.

Peering out of a peep-hole in himself, the hedgehog waited for an
opening. It was no blunderer's game, this. Death was the price of a
slip. He knew, however, and accepted the risks deliberately--a plucky
enough act, when you come to think of it, for a beast no more than a
foot long and one and a half pounds heavy.

The opening came. Quicker than you could realize, the hedgehog half
unrolled, and side-chopped with his glistening teeth. Quick, too, and
quicker, the venomous, flat serpent head writ