Yet you may see him, now and then, in his white suit or in his brown, gliding with lithe, almost snake-like movement along the lower fence rails, going forth hunting or bearing home his game, a bird or a fat field-mouse. In a cranny of an old lichen-scaled stone wall you may see his bright eyes gleaming out of the darkness, like dewdrops caught in a spider's web, and then the brown head thrust cautiously forth to peer curiously at you. Then he may favor you with the exhibition of an acrobatic feat: his hinder paws being on the ground in the position of standing, he twists his slender body so that his forepaws are placed in just the reverse position on the stone or rail above him, and he looks upward and backward.
He may be induced to favor you with intimate and familiar acquaintance, to take bits of meat from your hand and even to climb to your lap and search your pockets and suffer you to lay a gentle hand upon him, but he has sharp teeth wherewith to resent too great liberties.
While he may be almost a pet of a household and quite a welcome visitor of rat-infested premises, he becomes one of the worst enemies of the poultry-wife when he is tempted to fall upon her broods of chicks. He seems possessed of a murderous frenzy, and slays as ruthlessly and needlessly as a wolf or a human game-butcher or the insatiate angler. Neither is he the friend of the sportsman, for he makes havoc among the young grouse and quail and the callow woodcock.
The trapper reviles him when he finds him in his mink trap, for all the beauty of his ermine a worthless prize drawn in this chanceful lottery. When every one carried his money in a purse, the weasel's slender white skin was in favor with country folk. This use survives only in the command or exhortation to "draw your weasel." When the purse was empty, it gave the spendthrift an untimely hint by creeping out of his pocket. In the primest condition of his fur he neither keeps nor puts money in your pocket now. He is worth more to look at, with his lithe body quick with life, than to possess in death.
LIII
FEBRUARY DAYS
In the blur of storm or under clear skies, the span of daylight stretches farther from the fading dusk of dawn to the thickening dusk of evening. Now in the silent downfall of snow, now in the drift and whirl of flakes driven from the sky and tossed from the earth by the shrieking wind, the day's passage is unmarked by shadows. It is but a long twilight, coming upon the world out of one misty gloom, and going from it into another. Now the stars fade and vanish in the yellow morning sky, the long shadows of the hills, clear cut on the shining fields, swing slowly northward and draw eastward to the netted umbrage of the wood. So the dazzling day grows and wanes and the attenuated shadows are again stretched to their utmost, then dissolved in the flood of shade, and the pursued sunlight takes flight from the mountain peaks to the clouds, from cloud to cloud along the darkening sky, and vanishes beyond the blue barrier of the horizon.
There are days of perfect calm and hours of stillness as of sleep, when the lightest wisp of cloud fleece hangs moveless against the sky and the pine-trees forget their song. But for the white columns of smoke that, unbent in the still air, arise from farmstead chimneys, one might imagine that all affairs of life had been laid aside; for no other sign of them is visible, no sound of them falls upon the ear. You see the cows and sheep in the sheltered barnyards and their lazy breaths arising in little clouds, but no voice of theirs drifts to you.
No laden team crawls creaking along the highway nor merry jangle of sleigh bells flying into and out of hearing over its smooth course, nor for a space do the tireless panting engine and roaring train divide earth and sky with a wedge of dissolving vapor. The broad expanse of the lake is a white plain of snow-covered ice: no dash of angry waves assails its shore still glittering with the trophies of their last assault; no glimmer of bright waters greets the sun; no keel is afloat; the lighthouse, its occupation gone, stares day and night with dull eyes from its lonely rock, upon a silent deserted waste.