THE WIND TO SWAY THE CORN AND HELP
HIM.]

The stoat heralded his coming by a stealthy swish that could be heard full
twenty yards away. Many a foolish bewildered vole he caught, but never a
harvest mouse.

The rat's approach was a blundering four-footed _crescendo_, clear
to mouse-ears as is the ringing of a horse's hoofs to man. Little else
appeared at all. Now and again came a foolish hen-faced pheasant, strayed
from its nursery, and screaming for its keeper. One was shot as it crossed
the path in front of him, but we must not say anything about that. Now and
again a corn-crake, moving in silence, bowed to the ground, but betrayed
by its loquacity. Now and again a trembling glass-eyed rabbit. To each and
every footstep he had one invariable response. He ran up the nearest
cornstalk, as high as he could go, and watched the author of it pass
beneath him. He was rarely sighted. Once a weasel leapt at him. The weasel
is a pretty jumper, but this time a tendril of convolvulus upset his aim.
Before he reached the ground again the mouse was five and twenty feet
away, playing with his tail.

Half the summer passed before he tired of these diversions. The coming
of the sparrows put an end to them. They came just as the corn-ears had
commenced to harden. There must have been a thousand. They were not in
the field all day, but, while they were there, life was not worth living.
Picture it to yourself. A thousand unkempt, shrieking hooligans, plucking
at the corn-ears, flinging the milky grain aside half eaten, filling the
air with the whirring of their wings as they sighted man a hundred yards
away, back again as man departed, quarrelling incessantly, blatant, noisy,
vulgar. The cornstalks were no place for mice while sparrows were about.

[Illustration: AS DAINTY A LITTLE HARVEST MOUSE AS EVER CROSSED A
CORNFIELD.]

But the evil had been of short duration. A month had seen the end of it.
During that month the ways of the mouse were humble. He wandered in and
out the undergrowth, feeding on what the sparrows had discarded. Not that
he was really afraid of them. Had they cared to eat him, they assuredly
would have done so at the start. But they never missed the opportunity of
making him jump, and involuntary jumping is always unpleasant.

However, the life below had its compensations. He would certainly have
lost her in the waving maze above. As it was, he saw her at the end of a
straight avenue, and he could more or less ma