nd hunters of the old-fashioned,
leisurely school. They marked for me the beginning of a pleasant study
of the water-voles that lived in their burrows on the brink of the
river, and were sometimes hunted as persistently as were the brown rats,
but far more frequently eluded our hounds than did the noxious little
brutes we particularly desired to destroy.

Wherever they take up their quarters, about the farmstead during winter
or in the open fields during summer, brown rats are an insufferable
nuisance. There is no courtesy or kindness in the nature of the rat; no
nesting bird is safe from his attacks, unless her home is beyond his
reach in some cleft of a rock that he cannot scale or in some fork of a
tree that he cannot climb. He is a cannibal--even the young and the sick
of his own kind become the victims of his rapacious hunger--and he will
eat almost anything, living or dead, from the refuse in a garbage heap
to the dainty egg of a willow-wren in the tiny, domed nest amid the
briars at the margin of the river.

The water-vole is often called, wrongly, the water-rat, but it is of
very different habits, and is well nigh entirely a vegetable feeder, and
one of the most charming and most inoffensive creatures in Britain. To
the close observer of Nature, differences in the character of
animals--even among the members of one species--soon become apparent. I
was struck with manifestations of such unlikeness when I kept small
communities of ants in artificial nests between slips of glass, so as
to watch their doings in my hours of leisure. One nest of yellow ants
contained at first a dozen workers and a queen; and when I began to
study them I used to mark with minute spots of white the bodies of the
particular ants under observation. These spots would remain till the
ants had time for their toilet and either licked themselves clean or
were licked clean by sympathetic companions. At the outset I found that
under a magnifying glass two of the dozen workers were readily
distinguishable from the others because of their size and shape.
Gradually, by detecting little peculiarities, I could single out the
ants, and so had no need to mark my tiny pets in order to follow their
movements, except on occasions when they clustered round the queen, or
rested, gossiping in little groups, here and there in the rooms and
passages of their dwelling. One ant was greedy, and, if she was the
first to find a fresh drop of honey I had placed out