EAR.

The dawn, with easy movement, comes across the eastern hills; the mists
roll up from steaming hollows to a cloudless sky; the windows of a
farm-house in the dingle gleam and sparkle with the light. So came the
fair, unhesitating spring; so rolled the veil of winter's gloom away; so
gleamed and sparkled with responsive greeting every tree and bush and
flower in the awakened river valley. The springs and summers of our life
are few, yet in each radiant dawn and sunrise they may, in brief, be
found.

Filled with the restlessness of springtide life--a restlessness felt by
all wild creatures, and inherited by man from far distant ages when,
depending on the hunt for his sustenance, he followed the migrations of
the beasts--Brighteye often left his retreat much earlier in the
afternoon than had been his wont, and stole along the river-paths even
while the sunshine lingered on the crest of the hill and on the ripples
by the stakes below the pool.

Prompted by an increasing feeling of loneliness and a strong desire that
one of his kindred should share with him his comfortable home, he
occupied much of his time in enlarging the upper chamber of the burrow
till it formed a snug, commodious sleeping place ceiled by the twisted
willow-roots; and, throwing the soil behind him down the shaft, he
cleared the floor till it was smooth and level. Then he boldly sallied
forth, determined to wander far in search of a mate rather than remain a
bachelor. He proceeded down-stream beside the trout-reach, and for a
long time his journey was in vain. He heard a faint plash on the surface
of the water, and at once his little heart beat fast with mingled hope
and fear; but the sound merely indicated that the last of winter's
withered oak-leaves, pushed gently aside by a swelling bud, had fallen
from the bough. Suddenly, from the ruined garden above him on the brow
of the slope, came the dread hunting cry of his old enemy, the tawny
owl. Even as the first weird note struck with far-spreading resonance on
the silence of the night, all longing and hope forsook the vole.
Realising only that he was in a strange place far from home, and exposed
to many unknown dangers, he sat as moveless as the pebbles around him,
till, from a repetition of the cry, he learned that the owl was
departing into the heart of the wood. Then, silently, he journeyed
onward. Further and still further--past the rocky shelf where he had
landed after his escape from the