with his companions,
waiting for the squelching sound of her footsteps, as she returned across
the mud, and quarrelling in anticipation of what she would bring.

[Illustration: READY, AT THE FIRST SCENT OF DANGER, TO GLIDE BACK TO
COVER.]

Now and again a different sound would reach the hollow--the dragging tail
swish of the water-vole, or the fussy scramble of some belated moorhen.
These he soon learned to distinguish from the stealthy, broken, hanging
footfall of the beast of prey. When that was heard, both he and his
companions would crouch together in the darkest corner of the burrow and
hold their breath.

Once such a sound stopped abruptly and close at hand; a faint foetid
odour permeated from without, and he felt instinctively that the enemy was
at the gate. The danger passed, but that night the old vole failed to
return.

The night following the same sound came, and ceased. This time, however,
the silence was succeeded by a fierce scratching, and he soon realized
that the entrance to the nest was blocked, and that something, bigger and
stronger than he yet knew of, was working its way nearer and nearer. There
was a clatter of falling stones and earth, and the "something" was
whirling in their midst. Wild confusion followed. The whole interior of
the nest seemed occupied by a swift-circling, curling, sinuous form.

Small as he was, and crouching as only a vole can crouch, there was no
escape from contact with it. Three times the hot loathsome breath hissed
over him, as he lay flattened to the ground. Then, as the lithe body swept
round, he was flung aside, and, by a lucky chance, found himself opposite
the outlet. In an agony of terror he scrambled up the shaft, and concealed
himself in an adjoining grass-tuft. He was sick, and dizzy, and bruised
all over.

Scarcely had he recovered sufficient coolness to look about him, when the
object of his terror emerged with dripping jaws, and he was enabled, for
the first time, to form an opinion of the arch-enemy of vole-kind.

To avoid the bird of prey, a vole need only remain below the surface; to
avoid the little gentleman in black, he need only rise above it; but from
the grim pursuit of the weasel, bent on meal or murder, there is no
escape.

Terror-stricken as he was, he could hardly help admiring the easy supple
swagger of the creature's movements. She held her broad browed head erect,
the bristles pointed like needles from her blood-streaked muzzle, grit a