sed by the increasing warmth,
carried her offspring from the deep recess where, in her tunnelled nest,
she had brooded over them while the north-east wind blew through the
leafless boughs, and laid them side by side in a roomy chamber
immediately beneath the stone that screened the spot to which, in the
autumn dusk, the father vole resorted that he might watch and wait
before the darkness deepened on the fields and woods. The bees from the
hives in the farm garden, and innumerable flies from their winter
retreats in the hedgerows, came eagerly to the golden blossoms of the
furze near the bank-voles' colony. The bees alighted with care on the
lower petals of the flowers, and thence climbed quickly to the hidden
sweets; but the flies, heedless adventurers, dropped haphazard among the
sprays, and were content to filch the specks of pollen dust and the tiny
drops of nectar scattered by the honey-bees. A spirit of restlessness,
of strife, of strange, unsatisfied desire, possessed all Nature's
children; it raised the primrose from amid the deep-veined leaves
close-pressed on the carpet of the grass, it tuned the carols of the
robin and the thrush, it caused the wild jack-hare to roam by daylight
along paths which hitherto he had not followed save by night. Kweek felt
the subtle influence; long before dark he would venture from his home,
steal through the "creeps," which had now become evident because of
frequent "traffic," and visit the distant colonies of his kindred beyond
the wood.

Of the flourishing community living in the burrow before the weasels'
raid none survived but Kweek and his parents. One night, however, the
father vole, while foraging near the hedgerow, was snapped up and eaten
by the big brown owl from the beech-wood across the valley. In the
woodlands the greatest expert on the ways of voles was the brown owl.
His noiseless wings never gave the slightest alarm, and never interfered
with his sense of hearing--so acute that the faint rustle of a leaf or a
grass-blade brought him, like a bolt, from the sky, to hover close to
the earth, eager, inquisitive, merciless, till a movement on the part
of his quarry sealed its doom.

The mother vole, feeling lonely and more than ever afraid, wandered far
away, and found another mate in a sleek, bright-eyed little creature
inhabiting a roomy chamber excavated in the loose soil around a heap of
stones on the crest of the hill. Kweek, nevertheless, remained faithful
to t