n of any sleek young
she-vole he happened to have chosen for his mate.

Soon after his eyes were open, the adult voles of the colony began to
harvest their winter supplies. Seeds of all kinds were stored in
shallow hiding places--under stones, or under fallen branches--or in
certain chambers of the burrow set apart for that especial purpose; and
as each granary was filled its entrance was securely stopped by a mound
of earth thrown up by the busy harvesters.

The first solid food Kweek tasted was the black, glossy seed of a
columbine, which his mother, busily collecting provender, chanced to
drop near him as she hurried to her storehouse. Earlier in the night,
just outside the burrow, he had watched her with great curiosity as she
daintily nibbled a grain of wheat brought from a gateway where the laden
waggons had passed. He had loitered near, searching among the
grass-roots for some fragment he supposed his mother to have left
behind, but he found only a rough, prickly husk, that stuck beneath his
tongue, nearly choked him, and drove him frantic with irritation, till,
after much violent shaking and twitching, and rubbing his throat and
muzzle with his fore-paws, he managed to get rid of the objectionable
morsel. Something, however, in the taste of the husk so aroused his
appetite for solid food, that when his mother dropped the columbine seed
he at once picked it up in his fore-paws, and, stripping off the hard,
glossy covering, devoured it with the keen relish of a new hunger that
as yet he could not entirely understand. His growth, directly he learned
to feed on the seeds his mother showed him, and to forage a little for
himself, was more rapid than before. Nature seemed in a hurry to make
him strong and fat, that he might be able to endure the cold and
privation of winter.

By the end of November, when at night the first rime-frosts lay on the
fallow, and the voles, disliking the chill mists, seldom left their
burrow, Kweek was already bigger than his dam. He was, in fact, the
equal of his sire in bone and length, but he was loose-limbed and had
not filled out to those exact proportions which, among voles as among
all other wildlings of the field, make for perfect symmetry, grace, and
stamina, and come only with maturity and the first love season.

When about two months old, Kweek, for the first time since the weasels
had visited the burrow, experienced a narrow escape from death. The
night was mild and bright,