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EAR. The dawn, with easy movement, comes across the eastern hills; the mists roll up from steaming hollows to a cloudless sky; the windows of a farm-house in the dingle gleam and sparkle with the light. So came the fair, unhesitating spring; so rolled the veil of winter's gloom away; so gleamed and sparkled with responsive greeting every tree and bush and flower in the awakened river valley. The springs and summers of our life are few, yet in each radiant dawn and sunrise they may, in brief, be found. Filled with the restlessness of springtide life--a restlessness felt by all wild creatures, and inherited by man from far distant ages when, depending on the hunt for his sustenance, he followed the migrations of the beasts--Brighteye often left his retreat much earlier in the afternoon than had been his wont, and stole along the river-paths even while the sunshine lingered on the crest of the hill and on the ripples by the stakes below the pool. Prompted by an increasing feeling of loneliness and a strong desire that one of his kindred should share with him his comfortable home, he occupied much of his time in enlarging the upper chamber of the burrow till it formed a snug, commodious sleeping place ceiled by the twisted willow-roots; and, throwing the soil behind him down the shaft, he cleared the floor till it was smooth and level. Then he boldly sallied forth, determined to wander far in search of a mate rather than remain a bachelor. He proceeded down-stream beside the trout-reach, and for a long time his journey was in vain. He heard a faint plash on the surface of the water, and at once his little heart beat fast with mingled hope and fear; but the sound merely indicated that the last of winter's withered oak-leaves, pushed gently aside by a swelling bud, had fallen from the bough. Suddenly, from the ruined garden above him on the brow of the slope, came the dread hunting cry of his old enemy, the tawny owl. Even as the first weird note struck with far-spreading resonance on the silence of the night, all longing and hope forsook the vole. Realising only that he was in a strange place far from home, and exposed to many unknown dangers, he sat as moveless as the pebbles around him, till, from a repetition of the cry, he learned that the owl was departing into the heart of the wood. Then, silently, he journeyed onward. Further and still further--past the rocky shelf where he had landed after his escape from the
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