ustration: DAME WEASEL AND HER CHILDREN.]

THE

WEASELS OF HOLM-WOOD.

CHAPTER I.

In a pleasant country where green meadows lay stretched by
the side of a broad river whose banks were lined with the
pollard-willow and tall poplar, there once dwelt a family of
Weasels, known, from their place of residence, as the
Weasels of Holm-wood.

Holm-wood was a little island covered with underwood,
rushes, and wild flowers. A few aged trees stood by its
edge, bathing their long arms in the stream, and in the
hollow trunk of one of these the Weasels lived.

Any fine morning you might have seen the mother of this
family carrying her infant in her arms, and followed by her
other children, a girl and two boys, who would amuse
themselves by dragging little wooden horses, playing at
soldiers with mock muskets, running against the wind with
little whirligig mills, or frolicking about with a thousand
of the antics of children. Their father, known every where
as Old Weasel, was of a most resolute and unbending
disposition; he made many enemies, and was ever at war
with one or other of his neighbours. The Partridges of
Clover-field asserted that he sucked their eggs and stole
their young ones; the Rabbits of the Warren held Old Weasel
and all his family in the deepest abhorrence, and accused
them of the greatest cruelties; but no one complained of
them more bitterly than Dame Partlett of the Farm, who
accused the whole tribe of being born enemies of her race,
and said, that were it not that Old Weasel himself was
dreadfully afraid of her neighbour and friend, young Mastiff
of Kennel-wood, she verily believed that she should never
know any peace on earth.

[Illustration: THE ATTENTIVE PHYSICIAN.]

All the world will understand how, with such a character,
the Weasels had but few friends, and that when Miss Weasel
grew to be of age, she should have but few admirers;
nevertheless two or three families who were related to them
by blood kept up an occasional acquaintance, and among them
the Ferrets of Hollow-oak were the most intimate. Now it so
happened that one evening, when out for a ramble in the
woods, a branch of a tree on which Miss Weasel had mounted
in order to get nearer to young Linnet, with whom she wished
to be on intimate terms, broke suddenly off, and the poor
young lady was precipitated to the ground and sadly hurt.
Her cries brought to her assistance her younger brother Tom,
who, as soon as he had helped her