ily of voles swam in and out of the
shallows opposite my hiding place; but none of the little animals
approached the buttress near the stakes. Frequently I saw their
footprints on the sandy margin, but never the footprints of Brighteye.
Somehow, somewhere, he had met relentless fate.

THE FIELD-VOLE.

I.

HIDDEN PATHWAYS IN THE GRASS.

The sun had set, the evening was calm, and a mist hung over the
countryside when a field-vole appeared at the mouth of his burrow in a
mossy pasture. The little grey creature was one of the most timorous of
the feeble folk dwelling in the pleasant wilderness of the Valley of
Olwen. His life, like that of Brighteye, the water-vole, was beset with
enemies; but Nature had given to him, as to the water-vole, acute senses
of sight, and smell, and hearing, and a great power of quick and
intelligent action. He had lived four years, survived a hundred dangers,
and reared twenty healthy families; and his wits were so finely
sharpened that he was recognised by a flourishing colony, which had
gradually increased around his moss-roofed home, as the wisest and most
wide-awake field-vole that ever nibbled a turnip or harvested a seed.

For a moment the vole sat in the mouth of the burrow, with nothing of
himself visible but a blunt little snout twitching as he sniffed the
air, and two beady eyes moving restlessly as he peered into the sky.
Suddenly he leaped out and squatted beside the nearest stone. A robin,
disturbed in his roosting place by another of his kind, flew from the
hedge in furious pursuit of the intruder, and passed within a few inches
of the burrow. The vole, alarmed by the rush of wings, instantly
vanished; but soon, convinced that no cause for fear existed, he again
left his burrow and for several minutes sat motionless by the stone.

He was not, however, idle--a field-vole is never idle save when he
sleeps--but he was puzzled by the different sounds and scents and sights
around him; they had become entangled, and while he watched and listened
his mind was trying to pick out a thread of meaning here and there. What
was the cause of that angry chatter, loud, prolonged, insistent, in the
fir plantation at the bottom of the field? Some unwelcome creature, bent
on mischief--perhaps a weasel or a cat--was wandering through the
undergrowth, and the blackbirds, joined by the finches, the wrens, and
the tits, were endeavouring to drive it from the neighbourhood.
Gradually the no