warm aromatic scents, from the
sun-steeped blooms and grass-tops. The broad, blooming, tranquil
expanse, shimmering and softly radiant in the heat, seemed the very
epitome of summer. Now and again a small cloud-shadow sailed across
it. Now and again a little wind, swooping down upon it gently, bent
the grass-tops all one way, and spread a sudden silvery pallor. Save
for the droning bees and flies there seemed to be but one live
creature astir between the grass and the blue. A solitary marsh-hawk,
far over by the rail fence, was winnowing slowly, slowly hither and
thither, lazily hunting.

All this was in the world above the grass-tops. But below the
grass-tops was a very different world,--a dense, tangled world of dim
green shade, shot with piercing shafts of sun, and populous with
small, furtive life. Here, among the brown and white roots, the
crowded green stems and the mottled stalks, the little earth kindreds
went busily about their affairs and their desires, giving scant
thought to the aerial world above them. All that made life significant
to them was here in the warm, green gloom; and when anything chanced
to part the grass to its depths they would scurry away in unanimous
indignation.

On a small stone, over which the green closed so thickly that, when he
chanced to look upward, he caught but the scantiest shreds of sky, sat
a half-grown field-mouse, washing his whiskers with his dainty claws.
His tiny, bead-like eyes kept ceaseless watch, peering through the
shadowy tangle for whatever might come near in the shape of foe or
prey. Presently two or three stems above his head were beaten down,
and a big green grasshopper, alighting clumsily from one of his blind
leaps, fell sprawling on the stone. Before he could struggle to his
long legs and climb back to the safer region of the grass-tops, the
little mouse was upon him. Sharp, white teeth pierced his green mail,
his legs kicked convulsively twice or thrice, and the faint
iridescence faded out of his big, blank, foolish eyes. The mouse made
his meal with relish, daintily discarding the dry legs and wing-cases.
Then, amid the green debris scattered upon the stone, he sat up, and
once more went through his fastidious toilet.

But life for the little mouse in his grass-world was not quite all
watching and hunting. When his toilet was complete, and he had amiably
let a large black cricket crawl by unmolested, he suddenly began to
whirl round and round on the sto