But doomed though he was, the mouse was game. He knew there was no poison in those fangs that gripped him, and he struggled desperately to break free. His powerful hind legs kicked the ground with a force which the snake, hampered at first by the fact of its length being partly trailed out through the tangle, was unable to quite control. With unerring instinct,—though this was the first snake he had ever encountered,—the mouse strove to reach its enemy's back and sever the bone with the fine chisels of his teeth. But it was just this that the snake was watchful to prevent. Three times in his convulsive leaps the mouse succeeded in touching the snake's body,—but with his feet only, never once with those destructive little teeth. The snake held him inexorably, with a steady, elastic pressure which yielded just so far, and never quite far enough. And in a minute or two the mouse's brave struggles grew more feeble.
All this, however,—the lashing and the wriggling and the jumping,—had not gone on without much disturbance to the grass-tops. Timothy head and clover-bloom, oxeye and feathery plume-grass, they had bowed and swayed and shivered till the commotion, very conspicuous to one looking down upon the tranquil, flowery sea of green, caught the attention of the marsh-hawk, which at that moment chanced to be perching on a high fence stake. The lean-headed, fierce-eyed, trim-feathered bird shot from his perch, and sailed on long wings over the grass to see what was happening. As the swift shadow hovered over the grass-tops, the snake looked up. Well he understood the significance of that sudden shade. Jerking back his fangs with difficulty from the mouse's neck, he started to glide off under the thickest matting of the roots. But lightning quick though he was, he was not quite quick enough. Just as his narrow head darted under the roots, the hawk, with wings held straight up, and talons reaching down, dropped upon him, and clutched the middle of his back in a grip of steel. The next moment he was jerked into the air, writhing and coiling, and striking in vain frenzy at his captor's mail of hard feathers. The hawk flew off with him over the sea of green to the top of the fence stake, there to devour him at leisure. The mouse, sore wounded but not past recovery, dragged himself back to the hollow under the stone. And over the stone the grass-tops, once more still, hummed with flies, and breathed warm perfumes in the distilling heat.
When the Moon Is over the Corn
When the Moon Is over the Corn
n the mystical transparency of the moonlight the leafy world seemed all afloat. The solid ground, the trees, the rail fences, the serried ranks of silver-washed corn seemed to have lost all substantial foundation. Everything lay swimming, as it were, upon a dream. The light that poured down from the round, gold-white, high-sailing moon was not ordinary moonlight, but that liquid enchantment which the sorceress of the heavens sheds at times, and notably at the ripe of the summer, lest earth should forget the incomprehensibility of beauty. A little to one side, beyond the corn-field and over a billowy mass of silvered leafage, stood the gray, clustered roofs of a backwoods farmstead.
In the top of a tall, slim poplar, leaning out from the edge of the woods and over the fence that marked the bounds of the wilderness, clung a queer-looking, roundish object, gently swaying in the magic light. It might almost have been mistaken for a huge, bristly bird's-nest, but for the squeaky grunts of satisfaction which it kept emitting at intervals. Whether it was that the magic of the moonlight had got into its blood, driving it to strange pastimes, or that it was merely indulging an established taste for the game of "Rock-a-bye-baby," observation made it plain that the porcupine was amusing itself by swinging in the tree-top. Any other of the woods folk would have chosen for their recreation a less conspicuous spot than this poplar-top thrust out over the open field. But the porcupine feared nobody, and was quite untroubled by bashfulness. He cared not a jot who heard, saw, or derided him. It was a pleasant world; and for all that had ever been shown him to the contrary, it belonged to him.