nd, barely in time, scurried to his hole. A fortnight afterwards, when,
again tempted out of doors by the mildness of the weather, the vole was
peeping through an archway of matted grass, the hawk, with even greater
rapidity than before, shot down from the sky. Had it not been that the
long grass screened an entrance on the outskirts of the burrow, Kweek
would then have met his fate. He fell, almost without knowing what was
happening, straight down the shaft; and the sharp talons of the hawk
touched nothing but grass and earth, and the end of a tail already
scarred by the claws of the owl. Next day, as, moving along the
galleries to his favourite exit, the vole passed beneath the shaft, he
saw, straight overhead, the shadowy wings outstretched, quivering,
lifting, gliding, pausing, while beneath those spreading fans the
baleful eyes gleamed yellow in the slant of the south-west sun, and the
cruel claws, indrawn against the keel-shaped breast, were clenched in
readiness for the deadly "stoop." Fascinated, the vole stayed awhile to
look at the hovering hawk. Then, as the bird passed from the line of
sight, he continued his way along the underground passage to the spot
where he usually left his home by one of the narrow, clean-cut holes
which, in a field-vole's burrow, seem to serve a somewhat similar
purpose to that of the "bolts" in a rabbit's warren; and there he again
looked out. The hawk still hovered in the calm winter air, so Kweek did
not venture that day to bask in the sun outside his door. As soon as he
had fed, and shaken every speck of loose loam from his fur, and washed
himself clean with his tiny red tongue, he once more sought his cosy
corner and fell asleep.

Presently a pink and purple sunset faded in the gloom of night, and a
heavy frost, beginning a month of bitter cold, lay over the fields. In
continuous slumber Kweek passed that dreary month, till the daisies
peeped in the grass, the snowdrops and the daffodils thrust forth their
sword-shaped leaves above the water-meadows, and the earliest violet
unfolded its petals by the pathway in the woods.

II.

THE VALLEY OF OLWEN.

Eastward, the sky was covered with pale cobalt; and in the midst of the
far-spreading blue hung a white and crimson cloud, like a puff of
bright-stained vapour blown up above the rim of the world. Westward, the
sky was coloured with brilliant primrose; and on the edge of the distant
moorlands lay a great bank of mist, rai