ne of a wing fluttering on the beam! He darted forward,
straight and swift as a weaver's shuttle, seized the delicate wing in
his strong white teeth, and dragged the baby bat from her hiding place.
Baby as she was, she was game. For one moment she sat up and chattered
angry defiance, in a voice like the winding of a watch, but so thin and
high-pitched that only a fine ear could have caught it. Then the mouse
seized her, bit her tiny neck through, and dragged her off, sprawling
limply, along the beam."

The Child nodded vigorously. He needed nothing more to convince him of
the superior security of a life of travel and adventure, as compared
with the truly appalling perils of staying at home.

"I see you take me!" said Uncle Andy approvingly. "But this, as you
will observe, was not Little Silk Wing, but his sister. For Little
Silk Wing life became now more interesting. Having only one baby left,
his mother was able to carry him with her wherever she went. And she
would not have left him alone again for the world, lest the unknown but
dreadful fate which had befallen his sister should overtake him also.

"He was old enough and wide awake enough by this time to appreciate his
advantages. He could feel the thrill of his mother's long, swinging
swoops through the dewy coolness of the dusk. He could thrill in
sympathy with her excitement of the chase, when she went fluttering up
into the thin pallor of the upper air, following inexorably the
desperate circlings of some high-flying cockchafer. When she dropped
like lead to snap up some sluggish night moth, its wings were not yet
quite dry from the chrysalis, as he clung to the swaying grass tops,
his tiny eyes sparkled keenly. And when she went zigzagging, with
breathless speed and terrifying violence, to evade the noiseless attack
of the brown owl, he hung on to her neck with the tenacity of despair
and imagined that their last hour had come. But it hadn't, for his
mother was clever and expert. She had fooled many owls in her day.

"This adventurous life of his, of course, was lived entirely at night.
During the day he slept, for the most part, folded in his mother's wing
membranes, while she hung by her toes from the edge of a warped board
in the warm goldy-brown shadows of the peak of the old barn. Outside,
along the high ridge pole, swallows, king birds, jays, and pigeons
gathered under the bright blue day to scream, chatter or coo their
ideas of life, eac