e neighbourhood,
increased in such a fashion that, before the following autumn, both the
pasture and the near ploughland were barren wastes completely
honeycombed with their dwellings. Every grass-root in the pasture was
eaten up; every stalk in the cornfield was nibbled through so
that the grain might be easily reached and devoured; and the
root-crops--potatoes, turnips, and mangolds--on the far side of the
cornfield were utterly spoiled; and in the hedgerows and the copse the
leaves dropped from the lifeless trees, each of which was marked by a
complete ring where the bark was gnawed away close to the ground.

But capricious Nature, as if regretting the haste with which she had
brought into the world her destructive little children, and desiring,
even at the cost of untold suffering and the loss of countless lives, to
restore the pleasant Cerdyn valley to its beauty of green fields and
leafy woods, sent her twin plagues of disease and starvation among the
voles, till, like the sapless leaves, they withered and died. And from
far and near the hawks and the owls, the weasels, the stoats, and the
foxes hastened to the scene. The keeper, at a loss to know whence they
came, and not understanding the lesson he was being taught, bewailed his
misfortune, but dared not stay their advent. At almost any hour of the
day, five or six kestrels might be seen quartering the fields or
hovering here and there among the burrows. And, long before dark, the
stoats and the weasels, as if knowing that, fulfilling a special
mission, they were now safe from their arch-enemy, the keeper, hunted
their prey through the "trash" of the hedge-banks, or in and out of the
passages underground.

The farm labourers, in desperate haste, dug numerous pitfalls, wide at
the bottom but narrow at the mouth, and trapped hundreds of the voles,
which, maddened by hunger but unable to climb the sloping sides,
attacked one another--all at last dying a miserable death. Not only did
the customary enemies of the voles arrive on the scene: Nature called to
her great task a number of unexpected destroyers--sea-gulls from the
distant coast, a kite from a wooded island on a desolate, far-off mere,
and a buzzard from a rocky fastness, rarely visited save by keepers and
shepherds, near the up-country lakes. Food had gradually become scarce
even for the few hundred voles that yet remained. No longer were they to
be seen at play together, in little groups, during the cool,