ack suddenly cowed him. He shrank and tried
to draw away; and in that moment the enemy had him by the throat. In
that moment the fight was ended; and in the next the invader was
satisfying his ravenous appetite on the warm flesh which he craved.

When this redoubtable little warrior had eaten his fill, he felt a
pleasant sense of drowsiness. First he moved a few feet farther along
the tunnel, till he reached the point where it was joined by the smaller
gallery of his own digging. At this point of vantage, with exits open
both ways, he hastily dug himself a little pocket or side chamber where
he could curl himself up in comfort. Here he licked his wounds for a
minute or two, and carefully washed his face with his clever, hand-like
fore paws. Then with a sense of perfect security he went to sleep, his
watchful nose, most trusty of sentinels, on guard at the threshold of
his bedchamber.

While he slept in this unseen retreat, among the short grasses just
above his sleep went on the busy mingling of comedy and tragedy, of
mirth and birth and death, which makes the sum of life on a summer day
in the pastures. Everywhere the grass, and the air above the grass, were
thronged with insects. Through the grass came gliding soundlessly a
long, smooth, sinuous brown shape with a quick-darting head and a
forked, amber-coloured, flickering tongue. The snake's body was about
the thickness of a man's thumb, and his back was unobtrusively but
exquisitely marked with a reticulation of fine lines. He seemed to be
travelling rather aimlessly, doubtless on the watch for any small quarry
he might catch sight of; but when he chanced upon the fresh-dug hole
where the shrew had begun his burrowing, he stopped abruptly. His fixed,
opaque-looking eyes grew strangely intent. With his head poised
immediately over the hole he remained perfectly rigid for some seconds.
Then he glided slowly into the burrow.

The black snake--for such he was called, in spite of his colour being
brown--had an undiscriminating appetite for moles and shrews alike. It
was of no concern to him that the flesh of the shrew was rank and tough;
for his sense of taste was, to say the least of it, rudimentary, and to
digestion so invincible as his, tough and tender were all one. He had
learned, of course, that shrews were averse to being swallowed, and that
they both could and would put up a stiff fight against such
consummation. But he had never yet captured one in such a posi