d fixed in a permanent attitude of
attention; and the snakes continued to stare at nothing. No one took the
slightest notice.

Then came the reply.

It was as if a person or a thing, deep down in the bowels of the earth,
hearing the bird, stirred in its sleep, and shouted up, "I come." And it
came.

Heralded by a peculiar, quaint, little, chatty, sibilant, hissing,
whistling chuckle, there emerged from a regular cave that he, or an
ant-bear, or some other burrower had constructed under an ancient bush, a
beast--a most remarkable beast.

It was long--about three feet. It was low; it was stumpy, clumpy,
sturdy, bear-like, and altogether odd. It had no ears that any one could
find, and it rattled the most murderous armament of claws that you ever
guessed at. But that was not all; not by any means. It, or, rather, he,
had really been colored grayish white in the first place; but Nature had
thoughtlessly dropped him into a vat of black paint on his "tummy," flat,
and left him there to swim about, so that by the time he got out he was
one half, including chin, black, and the other and upper half, including
top of head and back and top of tail, grayish white. And then, for a
joke, it seemed, Nature had painted a white band round where black and
grayish white met, a sort of water-line, so to speak, and let the poor
little beggar go--go, mark you, into a wild where self-advertisement is
something more than unhealthful for the smaller folks. Afterwards,
however, Nature--who is all a woman--had repented, seemingly, and being
unable to undo her own jest, had given to the little, slow, conspicuous
beast, as compensation, a courage surpassing the courage of any other
beast on earth. The result was rather curious--it was also the ratel, or
honey-badger, who had nothing at all to do with rats, but everything to
do with honey, and was self-evidently more than three-parts badger.

"Kru-tshee! Kru-tshee-chlk! Krue-tshee-chlk-chlk, whee-tshee-tse-tse,
tse-i-who-o-o!" he whistled, and chuckled, and muttered, and fairly sang
to himself as he came trotting along towards the cheeky little bird, like
a dog that answers a whistle. His gait was all his own, as he, too, was
all his own original self, being unlike anything else, although he bore
the stamp of the badger people upon him.

With a calm, rolling trot, head down, tail up, back a fraction arched,
with something like the slouch of his distant relation, the wolverine, he