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Unnoticed by a passing owl, Kweek, worn to a skeleton by sickness and privation, crawled from his burrow into the moonlight of a calm, clear autumn night, and lay in the shadow of the stone where the old male vole had watched and listened for the cruel "vear."
He was never graceful, like his cousin the red vole, for his face was blunted, his eyes small, and his tail ridiculously insignificant. Nor could he cover the ground with the easy swinging jump that makes one suspect relationship between the red vole and the wood-mouse. Still for a common, vulgar, agrarian vole, he was passable enough, and could hold his own, tooth and nail, with his nest-fellows.
Let me curr to quercine shades Effund your albid hausts, lactiferous maids! Oh, might I vole to some umbrageous clump, Depart, be off, excede, evade, erump! I have lived by the sea-shore and by the mountains. No, I am not going to say which is best. The one where your place is is the best for you. But this difference there is: you can domesticate mountains, but the sea is ferae naturae.
The vole was not so far wrong after all, for could anything, whose intelligence was otherwise than laughable, be in his present plight? In front of him were three horizontal wires, above him were nine more, on either side an upright wooden wall, behind him a slanting one, whose lower extremity nipped his tail. On the floor lay innumerable crumbs of evil-smelling cheese.
He is delighted with his evening; intends to go and amuse himself every day by beating them; he even thinks of taking pupils. Once his back dried, they all together, the three mousmés and himself, play at Japanese "pigeon vole." Really I could not wish for anything more innocent, or more correct in every respect. Charles N and Madame Jonquille his wife, arrived unexpectedly at about ten o'clock.
Sometimes he accompanied his mother on her visits to distant portions of the colony, but the old vole more often left her octet behind, and then he would lie huddled up with his companions, waiting for the squelching sound of her footsteps, as she returned across the mud, and quarrelling in anticipation of what she would bring.
The uncertainty and quick shifting of partners a thing which the constancy of whist abhors; the dazzling supremacy and regal investiture of Spadille absurd, as she justly observed, in the pure aristocracy of whist, where his crown and garter give him no proper power above his brother-nobility of the Aces; the giddy vanity, so taking to the inexperienced, of playing alone: above all, the overpowering attractions of a Sans Prendre Vole, to the triumph of which there is certainly nothing parallel or approaching, in the contingencies of whist; all these, she would say, make quadrille a game of captivation to the young and enthusiastic.
Suddenly he heard a loud, mocking call, apparently coming from the direction of the moon: "Whoo-hoo! Whoo-hoo-o-o-o!" It was a strangely bewildering sound; so the vole squatted among the leaves and listened anxiously, every sense alert to catch the meaning of the weird, foreboding voice. "Whoo-hoo! Whoo-hoo-o-o-o!" again, from directly overhead, the cry rang out into the night.
He would have got out if he could, but to move was to discover more pins, and he just had to keep where he was, squealing fit to burst. And that saved the vole, probably. Not that there was any magic or rubbish of that kind, of course.
The vole, though anxious to begin his search for food, was not satisfied that the way was clear to the margin of the fir plantation, for the air was infused with many odours, some so strong and new that he could easily have followed their lines, but others so faint and old that their direction and identity were alike uncertain.
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