ad
their work cut out, and blundered down from every quarter. For death had
been very busy, and it was not the death that needs seeking out. About the
centre of the field the ground was stained with smears of half-dried
blood. So the beetles came in their thousands, and before morning broke
their task was done.

But the harvest mouse did not wait till the morning. The fragments of his
nest were empty, and he dared not look to see what the rat was eating.

He reached the sheaf-pile only just in time, for the brown owl was still
abroad, quartering the field with deadly certainty of purpose. As he crept
beneath it, he heard the brown rat scream.

His was the last sheaf to be piled, it was also the last sheaf to be
lifted. It travelled to the stack on the summit of the last load, and, by
a happy chance, formed one of the outside layer. By scratching and gnawing
continuously for an hour, he worked his way to the butt of it, paused for
a moment on the precipitous steep, and then scrambled lightly down to
earth. A perpendicular descent was nothing to him.

The foundations of the stack were already tenanted. Some of the inmates
had been, like himself, conveyed in sheaves, but more had rushed for
shelter across the bared expanse, which, on all previous nights, had been
a cornfield. There were mice of all kinds, there were half a dozen rats.
Before a week had passed, like had joined like. The rats were undisputed
masters of the basement; midway lived the common, vulgar mice; and,
highest of all, as befitted them, for they only could thread the
interstices of the upper sheaves, and they only had prehensile tails,
the harvest mice.

THE TRIVIAL FORTUNES OF MOLGE

It was a bubble that launched him into a practical existence. They were
rising by hundreds from the ooze that cloaked the bottom of the ditch. The
sunshine called them up and scattered them into nothingness as they
appeared. It was merely by chance that one, in its upward rush, hit his
envelope of starwort; it was merely by chance that the envelope needed no
greater stimulus to burst asunder.

Yet he was arranged to take advantage of the smallest jar. Like any other
newt, he had started life as a small white rounded egg; for ten days he
had remained, to all outward appearance, the same; cunningly enfolded,
neatly glued down, but still an egg. Then the temperature rose, and he
changed from sphere to cylinder, from cylinder to clumsy crescent, from
crescent t