eet above the river-level. An
overhanging grass-tuft masked her exit. As a rule, she used the back
way--a gently sloping tunnel which led from nest to stream. But to-night
it was very still. She padded quietly to the water's edge, slid through
the reeds that bordered it, and sat upon a silted crescent of mud that lay
on their far side. She always sat there to commence with. From the bank
she was invisible; up stream and down she could see for fifty yards, and
the pith of the reed-stem, of all things in her menu most charming, lay
ready to her orange-tinted teeth.

The noctules came from the hollow in the old chestnut. Twenty of them
lived there together, because it was a convenient, roomy hollow. No one
knows how it started--perhaps the wood-peckers could tell you--but rain
had certainly finished its excavation. The entrance was some thirty feet
above the ground--dank, noisome, and forbidding; the end was near the
roots.

Of course the old chestnut was dying; but that did not concern the
noctules. Each evening they crawled up to prove the weather; each evening,
of late, they had shambled back again into the gloomy depths, cannoning
awkwardly against each other, snarling and grumbling. The temper of bats
is uncertain, and hunger does not improve it.

But to-night it was better. One by one the ghoulish muzzles emerged,
peered into the darkness, and were satisfied; then the clumsy,
ill-balanced bodies, entangled in loose-folded leathern cerements--the
noctule's wing-spread measures a full foot; lastly, the webbed curving
triangle of feet and tail.

[Illustration: THE NOCTULES CAME FROM THE HOLLOW OF THE OLD CHESTNUT.]

Each, as it blundered free, clung, for a space, head downwards to the
bark, then slacked the grip of its ten toes, unhooked its thumbs,
dropped, and flew. Never was flight more graceful, never more perfectly
controlled. For fear of the swallows, the summer beetles fly by choice at
twilight; even then they must needs fly low, for the noctule never misses,
and the crunch of his teeth in a beetle's horny back is all he knows of
music.

The stoat came from a tree which was even more decrepit than the chestnut.
It had been an elm once. For four centuries it had defied the elements,
towering full fifty feet in rugged, imperial grandeur. The elements had
outstayed it. All that remained was a caverned stump, whose jagged summit
pointed, like an accusing finger, to the sky.

But, from a stoat standpoint, the