Then, for many months, I lived far from the well loved village. But one winter evening, after a long journey, I returned. The snow, falling rapidly, blotted out the prospect of the silent hills. The village seemed asleep; the shops were closed for the weekly holiday; not a footfall could be heard, not even a dog could be seen, down the long vista of the straggling street. The white walls of the cottages, and the white snow-drifts banked beside the irregular pavements, were in complete contrast to the radiant summer scene on which my eyes had lingered when I left the village. My feeling of cheerlessness was not dispelled even by the warmth and comfort of the little inn. Oppressed by the evidences of change, which in my disappointment were, no doubt, much exaggerated, I left the inn, and, heedless of the piercing cold and the driving snow, made my way towards the river. As I approached the stakes below the pool, a golden-eye duck rose from beside the bank, and on whistling wings flew swiftly into the gloom. I crouched in the shelter of a holly tree, and waited and watched till the cold became unendurable; but no other sign of life was visible; the pool was deserted.
In summer I returned home to stay, and then, as of old, I often wandered by the river. Evening after evening, till long after the last red glow had faded from the western hill-tops, I lingered by the pool. The owl sailed slowly past; the goatsucker hawked for moths about the oaks; the trout rose to the incautious flies; the corncrake babbled loudly in the long, lush meadow grass. A family of voles swam in and out of the shallows opposite my hiding place; but none of the little animals approached the buttress near the stakes. Frequently I saw their footprints on the sandy margin, but never the footprints of Brighteye. Somehow, somewhere, he had met relentless fate.
THE FIELD-VOLE.
I.
HIDDEN PATHWAYS IN THE GRASS.
The sun had set, the evening was calm, and a mist hung over the countryside when a field-vole appeared at the mouth of his burrow in a mossy pasture. The little grey creature was one of the most timorous of the feeble folk dwelling in the pleasant wilderness of the Valley of Olwen. His life, like that of Brighteye, the water-vole, was beset with enemies; but Nature had given to him, as to the water-vole, acute senses of sight, and smell, and hearing, and a great power of quick and intelligent action. He had lived four years, survived a hundred dangers, and reared twenty healthy families; and his wits were so finely sharpened that he was recognised by a flourishing colony, which had gradually increased around his moss-roofed home, as the wisest and most wide-awake field-vole that ever nibbled a turnip or harvested a seed.
For a moment the vole sat in the mouth of the burrow, with nothing of himself visible but a blunt little snout twitching as he sniffed the air, and two beady eyes moving restlessly as he peered into the sky. Suddenly he leaped out and squatted beside the nearest stone. A robin, disturbed in his roosting place by another of his kind, flew from the hedge in furious pursuit of the intruder, and passed within a few inches of the burrow. The vole, alarmed by the rush of wings, instantly vanished; but soon, convinced that no cause for fear existed, he again left his burrow and for several minutes sat motionless by the stone.