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Sweet Vi'lets was always giving coppers and sixpences to this man, but one day they fell out when Flittermouse begged for a shilling. He must, he said, have a shilling, he couldn't do with less, and when the other refused he followed him, demanding the money with abusive words, to everybody's astonishment. Finally Sweet Vi'lets turned on him and told him to go to the devil.
But when David found Roger a little inclined to vaunt his superior woodcraft he set him a riddle to answer: "The baldmouse and the chauve-souri, The baukie-bird and bat, The barbastel and flittermouse, How many birds be that?" And the masons were all grinning at him before Roger found out that these were half a dozen names for the bat, from as many different places.
Prince Karl the Miller's Son was silent a moment. "But I am still looking out for another man with a head-piece to come after me. I have no son, and if I had, the chances are ten to one that he would be either a milksop or a flittermouse painted blue. Milksops I hate, and send to the monkeries. I can endure flittermice painted blue, but they must wear petticoats and pretty petticoats too.
I know not if it is owl or flittermouse; I could fancy it was a black cherub, an infernal cherub of darkness, not with the wings of a bird and the head of a baby, but with the head of a goblin and the wings of a bat.
"Do not waste good prayers needlessly," he said; "he will!" And so, with a careless and humorsome wave of his hand to one side, he went down the staircase, and so out into the quadrangle of the Palace. Now how this plan of my Lord Prince's worked in the Palace of Plassenburg I find it difficult to tell without writing myself down a "painted flittermouse," as the Prince expressed it.
Flittermouse in a rage went straight to the constable and denounced his patron as a sheep-stealer. He, Flittermouse, had been his servant and helper, and on the very last occasion of stealing a sheep he had got rid of the skin and offal by throwing them down an old disused well at the top of the village street.
"Right a flittermouse!" agreed Ruth, suddenly bursting into a laugh. "The chimney's full of them." "Oh, let's get out!" "In this rain?" and Ruth pointed to the window, where now the drops were falling, big and fast the vanguard of the storm. "But if a bat gets into your hair!" moaned Helen, rocking herself on her knees.
Flittermouse was the only witness for the prosecution, and the judge in his summing up said that, taking into consideration Garlick's known character in the village as a sober, diligent, honest man, it would be a little too much to hang him on the unsupported testimony of a creature like Flittermouse, who was half fool and half scoundrel.
He was a sober, hard-working man, an example to most, but there was this against him, that he cherished a very close friendship with a poor, disreputable, drunken loafer nicknamed "Flittermouse," who spent most of his time hanging about the old coaching inn at the place for the sake of tips.
Then he arose in sudden wrath, cursing her roundly and vowing she should not leave the room alive if she persisted in such threats. He told her that she was in a cave beneath the ruins of an old church, long the haunt of robbers, now the home of snakes and bats. Indeed, as he spoke a flittermouse scurried through the air within a foot of her ear.
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