g
eagerly with a quick, pumping motion of her body. The fat ball got
smaller and smaller, till soon it was very little bigger than an
ordinary sweet pea. The hornet turned it over and over impatiently, to
see if anything more was to be got out of it; then she spurned it
aside, and bounced into the air with a deep hum. She had certainly
been very amusing, but the Child drew a breath of relief when she was
gone. He had caught the copper-red flicker of her sting, as it barely
touched the victim, and it seemed to him like a jet of live flame.

When the hornet was gone the Child began once more to remember that
little stick in the soft moss beneath him. How had he ever forgotten
it? He decided that he must have been sitting on it for hours and
hours. But just as it was beginning fairly to burn its way into his
flesh, a queer little rushing sound close at his side brought his heart
into his throat. It was such a vicious, menacing little sound.
Glancing down, he saw that a tiny wood-mouse had darted upon a big
brown-winged butterfly and captured it. The big wings flapped
pathetically for a few seconds; but the mouse bit them off, to save
herself the bother of lagging useless material home to her burrow. She
was so near that the Child could have touched her by reaching out his
hand. But she took no more notice of him than if he had been a rotten
stump. Less, in fact, for she might have tried to gnaw into him if he
had been a rotten stump, in the hope of finding some wood-grubs.

The mouse dragged away the velvety body of the butterfly to her hole
under the roots. She was no more than just in time, for no sooner was
she out of sight than along came a fierce-eyed little shrew-mouse, the
most audacious and pugnacious of the mouse tribe, who would undoubtedly
have robbed her of her prey, and perhaps made a meal of her at the same
time. He nosed at the wings of the butterfly, nibbled at them, decided
they were no good, and then came ambling over to the Child's feet.
Shoe-leather! That was something quite new to him. He nibbled at it,
didn't seem to think much of it, crept along up to the top of the shoe,
sniffed at the sock, and came at last plump upon the Child's bare leg.
"Was he going to try a nibble at that, too?" wondered the Child
anxiously, his blue eyes getting very big and round. But no. This
live, human flesh--_unmistakably_ alive--and the startling Man smell of
it, were too much for the nerves of his sh