ainst his
aching limbs. Then, sneezing violently, and with his mouth encrusted
with froth and loam, he bolted from the scene of his unpleasant
adventure, never pausing till he reached his "earth" on the hillside, in
which, hidden from the mocking gaze of other prowlers of the night, he
could leisurely salve his wounds with the moisture of his soft, warm
tongue, and ponder over the lessons of his recent experience.

By far the most intelligent and powerful enemy of the young hedgehogs
was the farmer's dog; but, as he slept in the barn at night, and
generally accompanied the labourers to the upland fields by day, they
escaped, for a while, his unwelcome attentions. Foes hardly less
dreaded, because of their insatiable thirst for blood, were two polecats
living in a hole half-way up the wall of a ruined cottage not far from
the hillside farm-house. The polecats, however, were so occupied with
the care of a family, that, finding young rabbits plentiful in the
burrows on the heath, they seldom wandered into the open fields, till
the little "urchins," ready, at the first sign of danger, to curl
themselves within the proof-armour of their growing spines, were well
able to resist attack.

The hedgehogs were about three months old, and summer, brief and
beautiful, was passing away, when an incident occurred that might have
proved disastrous, though, fortunately, it resulted only in a practical
joke, such as Nature often plays on the children of the wilds. One calm,
dark night, while they were busy in the grass, a brown owl, hunting for
mice, sailed slowly by. Now, the brown owl, in spite of proverbial
wisdom gained during a long life in the dim seclusion of the woods, is
occasionally apt to blunder. Her character, indeed, seems full of quaint
contradictions. As she floats through the moonlight and the shadows of
the beech-aisles of Dollan, she appears to be a large bird, with a
philosophic contentment of mind--an ancient creature that, shunning the
fellow-ships of the garish modern day and loving the leisure and the
solitude of night, dreams of the past. But, beneath its loose feathery
garments, her body, hardly larger than that of a ringdove, is altogether
out of proportion to her long, narrow head and wide-spreading talons.
Visions of the past may come to her, as, blinking at the light of day,
she sits in the hollow of the tree, but at night she is far too
wide-awake to dream. And so great are the owl's powers of sight and
h