WILD MICE. 65 



between the walls a lot of pieces of paper, bits of cloth, 

 sticks, fur, and such stuff, forming a great bale, and know 

 that it was once the home of a house-mouse. You have 

 heard various anecdotes of how a shopkeeper misses small 

 pieces of money from his till, and suspects his clerk of tak- 

 ing it; how the clerk is a poor boy who is supporting a 

 widowed mother, or a sister at school, and the kind-hearted 

 shopkeeper shuts his eyes to his suspicions, and waits for 

 more and more proof before being convinced that his young 

 clerk is the thief ; but, as the money keeps disappearing, 

 at last he must accuse the clerk of taking it. Then the 

 story tells how, in spite of the boy's vehement and tear- 

 ful denial, a policeman is called in to arrest him, and when 

 everything has been searched to no purpose, and he is 

 about being taken to the police-station, how, away back in a 

 corner is discovered a mouse's nest made of stolen pieces 

 of ragged currency ten, twenty-five, and fifty-cent pieces. 

 Then everybody is happy again, and the story ends with a 

 capital moral ! 



More than one such stolen house the mice have really 

 built, and sometimes their work has destroyed half a hun- 

 dred dollars, and caused no end of heartaches. Their little 

 teeth are not to be despised, I assure you. I believe one of 

 the most disastrous of those great floods which in past years 



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