434 THE ROLL OF THE SEASONS 



on the other hand, scarcely makes a pretence of sleep- 

 ing, or even remaining at home, though they do lay 

 up a generous store of nuts, acorns, hips and haws, or 

 whatever grain is grown in their fields. In the coldest 

 months they are foraging to and fro for the food they 

 do not require, driving tunnels under the thin snow, 

 falling victims to the owl even in the grim winter nights, 

 while their cousins, the marmot, the lemming, and their 

 brothers, the Continental voles, sleep fast under the 

 real snow of a more earnest winter. The one clause in 

 the vole's rule-of-thumb that will not vanish is its habit 

 of making a winter store. That comes of the instinct 

 of acquisitiveness that belongs to every created being. 

 What child that sees the earth strewn in autumn with 

 nuts, acorns, haws, and rowan berries, to say nothing 

 of apples and pears, does not wish to gather them into 

 a hoard for no particular reason, but just because they 

 are gatherable things ? And so the children of the wild 

 will gather them whether hard winter comes after or 

 no, as the bees store honey even in a land of perpetual 

 summer. It is not a painful necessity that impels them, 

 in the first place, to lay up store, but one of the greatest 

 pleasures in life, that turns out to have been sensible 

 as well as pleasant. Even those aesthetic souls, the 

 birds, are given to hoarding, though not, perhaps, to 

 drawing upon the hoard they make. The bovver-birds 

 and our own magpies collect glittering and beautiful 

 things ; jays, rooks, and other crows bury walnuts, 

 carrion, and other food ; the coal-tits that come to the 

 bird-table carry away far more than they eat, to lose 

 it in imagined hiding-places in the shrubbery. The 

 storing habit, if it can be called so in their case, has 

 not been turned to account by the birds. Who, after 



