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Here, too, he had many small friends, a society complete in itself, leading full and busy lives, but always with a spare moment to gossip, and exchange news with a visitor. To-day, however, though they were civil enough, the field-mice and harvest mice seemed pre-occupied.
You might take the skin of the Nemean lion himself, with a dozen of field-mice tacked on, and you would do no good. Why, I have seen a live lion limping before now, hide and all complete. 'Ah, you have a great deal to learn, cried Dinomachus; 'you have never taken the trouble to inquire into the operation of these valuable remedies.
"Because the animals there are all burrowers," he answered, " like the field-mice and the moles here. They will be, for ages to come." "How do you know that, if I may be so bold?" I rejoined. "As any one would who had been there to see," he replied. "It is a great sight, until you get used to it, when the earth gives a heave, and out comes a beast.
Boyd Cable is writing of men in the trenches: "Civilised Man, in his latest art of war, has gone back to be taught one more simple lesson by the beast of the field and the birds of the air; the armed hosts are hushed and stilled by the passing air-machine, exactly as the finches and field-mice of hedgerow and ditch and field are frozen to stillness by the shadow of a hovering hawk, the beat of its passing wing."
Here one or two Field-mice and a pair of Sora Rails were at home. Close at hand was the thick woods, where Partridges and Black Squirrels were sometimes seen. Yan was here one day sketching the trunk of a Hemlock to pass the watching time, but also because he had learned to love that old tree.
It is often difficult to decide between these two different interpretations of the use of fire in agricultural rites. In any case the fire-festival of Auvergne on the first Sunday in Lent may date from Druidical times. Thus in the province of Picardy "on the first Sunday of Lent people carried torches through the fields, exorcising the field-mice, the darnel, and the smut.
Then, from up above and far away, down the tunnel they had so lately travelled was borne to their ears in a faint musical hum the sound of distant bells ringing a joyful and clangorous peal. 'Very well sung, boys! cried the Rat heartily. 'And now come along in, all of you, and warm yourselves by the fire, and have something hot! 'Yes, come along, field-mice, cried the Mole eagerly.
"To-morrow I shall go to the pastrycook and demand that he be sent away. I am commander of the militia, and I know all the townsfolk think as I do." Drejer thought it might be well to pray from the pulpit as in time of plague, and in the bad year when the field-mice infested the country. Next morning Jorgen Kofod looked in on his way to the pastrycook's.
Since then I have seen an old fox with what looked like a dozen or more field-mice carried in this way; only, of course, the tails were crossed corn-cob fashion instead of the necks. The stealthiness with which a fox stalks his game is one of the most remarkable things about him. Stupid chickens are not the only birds captured.
Cato gives orders for the asparagus, and Switzer for the hot-beds. Crescenzi directs the walling, and Smith of Deanston the ploughing. Burns embalms all my field-mice, and Cowper drapes an urn for me in a tangled wilderness.
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