British Wild Beasts. 199 



" In a bam 

 He sees a mouse creeping in the corn. 

 Sits still and shuts his round blue eyes. 

 As if he slept, until he spies 

 The little beast within his reach. 

 Then starts and seizes on the wretch." — Butkr. 



Burns laments over the 



" Wee sleekit, cow'rin', tim'rons beastie," 



and its little home in the stubble ruined by the plough, — 



" That wee bit heap o' leaves an' stibble 

 Has cost thee mony a weary nibble." 



Two full-grown " harvest-mice " weigh exactly one half- 

 penny, and it was no doubt the marrow of this diminutive 

 species that Titania used to have on her toast. It is not, 

 however, out of place here to remind poets that the 

 " dehghtful" field-mouse, as they think it, and as it un- 

 doubtedly is to all lovers of Nature, is " the corn-destroyer " 

 of Holy Writ, and that they are " the mice that marred the 

 land " of PhUistia, the scourge of an angry Jehovah. Nor 

 — to descend to lesser catastrophes — are the field-mice that 

 ate up the Bishop of Bingen altogether trivial creatures. In 

 England and Europe generally, the "pilfering" field-mice 

 that "with far-fetched ear its hole supplies" (Clare), some- 

 times commit very serious depredations in the barns and 

 rick-yards into which it has been carried at harvest time. 

 Those that have been left behind in the fields become 

 partially torpid, and take refuge in Uttle grass-lined burrows ; 

 but their more fortunate friends in the barns keep awake in 

 winter " as if on purpose to show their gratitude for their 

 hberal provender." 



References are made to many of the mice of story — 

 Wyatt's fieldish mouse; the town mouse and its country 

 cousin ; the golden mice of the covenantal ark ; those that 

 fought the frogs ; the mouse (in Crabbe) 



