ir Bevis, please let me out, this gin
hurts me so; the teeth are very sharp and the spring is very strong, and
the tar-cord is very stout, so that I cannot break it. See how the iron
has skinned my leg and taken off the fur, and I am in such pain. Do
please let me go, before the ploughboy comes, or he will hit me with a
stick, or smash me with a stone, or put his iron-shod heel on me; and I
have been a very good weasel, Bevis. I have been catching the horrid
rats that eat the barley-meal put for the pigs. Oh, let me out, the gin
hurts me so!"

Bevis put his foot on the spring, and was pressing it down, and the
weasel thought he was already free, and looked across at the wood pile
under which he meant to hide, when Bevis heard a little squeak close to
his head, and looked up and saw a mouse under the eaves of the
cart-house, peeping forth from a tiny crevice, where the mortar had
fallen from between the stones of the wall.

"Bevis, Bevis!" said the mouse, "don't you do it--don't you let that
weasel go! He is a most dreadful wicked weasel, and his teeth are ever
so much sharper than that gin. He does not kill the rats, because he is
afraid of them (unless he can assassinate one in his sleep), but he
murdered my wife and sucked her blood, and her body, all dry and
withered, is up in the beam there, if you will get a ladder and look.
And he killed all my little mouses, and made me very unhappy, and I
shall never be able to get another wife to live with me in this
cart-house while he is about. There is no way we can get away from him.
If we go out into the field he follows us there, and if we go into the
sheds he comes after us there, and he is a cruel beast, that wicked
weasel. You know you ate the partridge's eggs," added the mouse,
speaking to the weasel.

"It is all false," said the weasel. "But it is true that you ate the
wheat out of the ears in the wheat-rick, and you know what was the
consequence. If that little bit of wheat you ate had been thrashed, and
ground, and baked, and made into bread, then that poor girl would have
had a crust to eat, and would not have jumped into the river, and she
would have had a son, and he would have been a great man and fought
battles, just as Bevis does with his brazen cannon, and won great
victories, and been the pride of all the nation. But you ate those
particular grains of wheat that were meant to do all this, you wicked
little mouse. Besides which, you ran across the bed one