little life seemed
fair and bright.

For a time he dared not match himself against another of the older
voles. But in an unimportant squabble with a mouse of his own age, he
soon proved the victor, and, finding his reward in the favour of a young
she-vole that had watched the quarrel from behind a grass-tuft, ran off
with her at midnight to his old, deserted burrow in the pasture. After
thoroughly examining the various galleries in the underground
labyrinth, the fastidious little pair dug out a clean, fresh chamber at
right angles to the main tunnel, and, contented, began in earnest the
duties of the year.

April came; and often, as he sat by his door, Kweek watched the gentle
showers sweep by in tall pillars of vapour through the moonbeams falling
aslant from the illumined edges of an overhanging cloud, and through the
shadows stretching in long, irregular lines between the fallow and the
copse; and night after night the shadows near the copse grew deeper, and
still deeper, as the hawthorn leaf-buds opened to the warmth of spring.

The grass-spears lengthened; the moss spread in new, rain-jewelled
velvet-pile over the pasture floor; the woodbine and the bramble trailed
their tender shoots above the hedge; a leafy screen sheltered each
woodland home; and even the narrow path from the field-voles' burrow to
the corner of the copse led through a perfect bower of half-transparent
greenery. The birds were everywhere busy with their nests in the
thickets; sometimes, in the quiet evening, long after the moon had
risen and Kweek had ventured forth to feed, the robin and the thrush,
perched on a bare ash-tree, sang their sweet solos to the sleepy fields;
and, with the earliest peep of dawn, the clear, wild notes of the
missel-thrush rang out over the valley from the beech-tree near the
river. The rabbits extended their galleries and dug new "breeding
earths" in their warren by the wood; and often, in the deep stillness of
the night, the call-note of an awakened bird echoed, murmuring, among
the rocks opposite the pines far down the slope.

During the past few weeks great events had happened in the new-made
chamber of the field-voles' burrow. Hundreds of dry grass-bents,
bleached and seasoned by the winter frosts and rains, had been collected
there, with tufts of withered moss, a stray feather or two dropped from
the ruined nest of a long-tailed titmouse in the furze, and a few fine,
hair-like roots of polypody fern from th