s
revenged by removing, not only an enemy, but a rival subsisting on food
often similar to that which is its own.

For a while after her awakening, the hedgehog fed chiefly on the big
earthworms which, induced by the increasing warmth, forsook the deep
recesses of their burrows, and tunnelled immediately beneath the
grass-roots, coming forth at night to lie outstretched amid the
undergrowth. She had, of necessity, to match their fear by her excessive
cunning. They frequently detected her presence by the slight vibrations
of the soil beneath her soft, slow-moving feet, and hurriedly withdrew
from her path, but more often she surprised and captured them by the
simple artifice of waiting and watching beside the burrows where scent
was fresh, and where, notwithstanding the noises reaching her from
above, she could readily distinguish the sounds of stretching, gliding
bodies moving to the surface through the tortuous passages below.

She soon became a wanderer, deserting her winter nest, and roaming
nightly further and yet further from the valley meadows, till she
reached a rough pasture at the end of the glen. In a thick hedgerow
skirting a secluded pond among alders and willows, she found food
unexpectedly varied and plentiful. Luscious snails, with striped yellow
and brown shells, were so common in the ditch beyond a certain
cattle-path, that, even after a whole day's fast, her hunger was quickly
appeased.

April drew near, the leaves of the trees expanded, and the voice of the
night wind in the branches changed from a moan to a whisper. At noon,
flies came forth to bask on the stones; the furze, decked with yellow
flowers, was visited by countless bees; and bronze-winged beetles crept
among the thorny branches of the hawthorn and the sloe. The hedgehog
knew little of the pulsing life of mid-day, but at dusk she sometimes
found a tired fly, or bee, or beetle, hiding in the matted grass
beneath the gorse, and so was made aware of summer's near approach.

Among the flags and the rushes of the pond, a pair of fussy moorhens
built their nest on an islet of decayed vegetation clustered round a
stone. At all hours of the day, the birds sailed gaily hither and
thither, or wandered, happy and impulsive, along the margin of the pool.
No care had they, and the solitude of their retreat seemed likely never
to be disturbed, till, one moonlit night, the fox, that last year had
killed the baby hedgehog in the glen, stole through th