402 AUTUMN AND WINTER 



devourers are perhaps the rats. But their number in a stack 

 is usually, but by no means always, small compared with the 

 mice, who on the average do vastly more damage. The 

 young mice, even if grown to full vitality, seem to be quite 

 without fear, the only young things perhaps that are. They 

 show no signs of alarm when you handle them ; they will 

 allow themselves to be recaught at will. Sometimes, so it 

 seems by their manner, they are quite dazed by the light. 

 They have been bred in the very depth of the stack where 

 light is even more conspicuously absent than air. Their antics 

 recall those of the young calves when first let out from the 



FIELD-MOUSE 



dark hovels in which they are often kept, especially in Wales. 

 As soon as they are free they dart ahead wildly, pulling them- 

 selves up with extraordinary abruptness right against any 

 chance obstacles, like a motor-car suddenly stopped by cross 

 traffic. They see men as trees walking. The spectacle is both 

 pitiful and ludicrous. The young mice run in just such an 

 aimless way ; but they are not, like the calves, frightened. 

 The new objects simply stop them ; and the man is too big 

 to be frightening, if his hands are warm and comforting. 



You will seldom see a stack threshed without the 

 appearance of many boys with sticks and men with terriers. 

 But not even English boys and fox-terriers are more ruth- 

 less to the escaping rats than are the domestic hens to the 



