r them both, in the heavy silence, could
be distinctly heard that horrible "brr-brr-brr" of flies that told its
own story.

Now, that was in the morning, soon after sunrise; but long before that,
indeed the moment the hedgehog had first attacked the owl and forced
her to turn her attention to him, the little female bank-vole, who by
some mischance or miscalculation, had evaded the first terrible
handshake of the owl which spells death, had rolled clear of the fight,
and dashed for her life to the nearest tussock of grass that offered
shelter; and the first thing she fell over there was our bank-vole,
"frozen" motionless. He was there because the scene of the fight was
between him and the holes in the bank, and for the life of him he could
not muster up courage to run the gauntlet past those dread, struggling
forms.

In the end, there being scarcely sufficient room in the tussock for
both to hide effectually, and there seeming to be some danger of the
combatants trampling them flat where they lay, he led the way up a
tree, whose gnarled bole took the ground barely six inches away. It
was one of those great-great-great-grandfather oaks, which, if it had
been in a more public spot, would certainly have been raised to the
dignity of one of the few hundred trees that hid Prince Charlie. It
was not, however; but it had another peculiarity, as the voles found
out later on.

Scared out of their little wits by the fury of their enemies below, and
afraid to go down and bolt across the open, even after the cessation of
hostilities, past those appallingly still, crouched bodies, who, for
all they had guarantee to the contrary, might be in fiendish, alliance
crouched there, waiting for them to descend, the two voles explored
gradually, in their own dainty, little, deprecating, creeping way,
branch after branch of the great spreading patriarch, till suddenly, at
the very tip of the longest and biggest limb of all, they
vanished--into ivy. What had happened was quite simple, however.
There was no trick in it. It was all above-board. It was simply that
the mighty tree at this spot grew close to one of those outcrops of
cliff that formed, as it were, broken-off pieces from the main cliffs
which bordered the river and the valley on one side farther up, and one
of the oak boughs had gradually been annexed by the ivy--itself of
great age--that clothed the face of the cliff.

Climbing steadily upwards through the network of ivy-s