beaten pathway guided his footsteps; wind and rain, frost and thaw, and
the new, slow growth of the grass, had obliterated every trail. But by
following the scent of the parent voles that had already stolen into
the wood, he reached in safety the banks of the rill. Having quenched
his thirst, he scratched the soft soil from beneath a stone and
satisfied his hunger with some succulent sprouts of herbage there
exposed to sight. Soon, tired from his unwonted exertion, and feeling
great pain through having torn the pads of his feet--which, like those
of all hibernating animals, had become extremely tender from want of
exercise--he crept home to his burrow, and rested till the soreness had
gone from his limbs, and he felt active and hungry again.

For the vole, guided as he was by his appetite, the most wholesome
vegetable food was a ripe, well-flavoured seed. It contained all that
the plant could give; leaf and stalk were tasteless compared with it,
and were accepted only as a change of diet, or as a medicine, or as a
last resource. Next to a seed, he loved a tender root, or a stem that
had not yet thrust itself through the soil, and was therefore crisp and
dainty to the taste. But the vole did not subsist entirely on vegetable
food. Occasionally, when the nights were warm, he surprised some little
insect hiding in the moss, and pounced on his prey almost as greedily
as the trout in the stream below the hill rose to a passing fly. And
just as the cattle in the distant farm throve on grain and oil-cake, and
the pheasant in the copse near by on wood-ants' "eggs," and the trout in
the Cerdyn brook on ephemerals hatched at the margin of the pool, so
Kweek, the field-vole, abroad in the nights of summer, grew sleek and
well conditioned on good supplies of seeds and grubs. But now, worn out
by long privation, he was tired and weak.

Gradually, from the bed of winter death, from the rotting leaf-mould and
the cold, damp earth, the fresh, bright forms of spring arose. The
purple and crimson trails of the periwinkle lengthened over the stones;
then the spear-shaped buds, prompted by the flow of pulsing sap, lifted
themselves above the glossy leaves and burst into flowers. The dandelion
and the celandine peeped from the grass; the primrose garlanded each
sunny mound on the margin of the wood; and the willow catkins, clothed
with silver and pearly grey, waved in the moist, warm breeze as it
wandered by the brook. The queen-ant, arou