198 The Poets Beasts. 



thrifty struggling against poverty. Thus Wyatt, in his 

 delightful poem " On the Mean and Sure Estate" — 



" The fieldish mouse, 

 That for because her livelihood was but thin, 

 Would needs go see her townish sister's house, 

 She thought herself endured to grievous pain, 

 The stormy blasts her cave so sore did souse ; 

 That when the furrows swimmed with the rain, 

 She must be cold and wet, in sorry plight. 

 And worse than that, bare meat there did remain. 

 To comfort her, when she her house had dight, 

 Sometime a barley corn, sometime a bean, 

 For which she laboured hard both day and night 

 In harvest time, while she might go and glean. 

 And when her store was stroyed with the flood. 

 Then welladay ! for she undone was clean." 



Thus Clare delights in the pretty little animal with its 

 nest swinging from a wheat-stalk — 



" The little chumbling mouse 

 Gnarls the dead weed for her house. 



The fields are cleared, the labouring mice 



To sheltering hedge or wood patrole, 

 When hips and haws for food suffice 



That chumbled lie about their hole." 



Hurdis sits out to watch 



" The wanton mouse, 

 And see liim gambol round the primrose head, 

 Till the still owl comes smoothly sailing forth, 

 And with a shrill ' to-whit ' breaks off his dance 

 And sends him scouring home." 



Indeed, the owl, "whose meteor eyes shoot horror through 

 the dark," often gets well rated for "numbing the tiny 

 revellers with dread." Its habit of "prowling along the 

 fields " is thrown in its beak, and it is reproached for sub- 

 terfuge, when 



