42 EVERYDAY ADVENTURES 



behind a row of books that stood on the red-oak 

 plank which I had put in as a mantel-piece. Un- 

 fortunately he had forgotten to hide his long silky 

 tail. It hung down through the crack between the 

 plank and the rough stone of the chimney. I tip- 

 toed over and gave it a pinch to remind him to meddle 

 no more with other people's mattresses. 



Returning to the wood-road on that morning, 

 among the trails of the deer-mice were the more 

 numerous tracks of the meadow- or field-mouse. 

 They show no tail-mark, and the smaller foot- 

 prints were not side by side as with the deer-mice, 

 but almost always one behind the other. These 

 smaller paw-marks among all jumping-animals, such 

 as rabbits, squirrels, and mice, are always the marks 

 of the fore-paws. The larger far-apart tracks mark 

 where the hind feet of the jumper come down in front 

 and outside of the fore-paws as he jumps. 



On that day, among the mouse-tracks on the snow 

 there showed another faint trail, which looked like 

 a string of tiny exclamation marks with a tail-mark 

 between them. It was the track of the masked shrew, 

 the smallest mammal of the Eastern states. This 

 tiny fierce fragment of flesh and blood is only about 

 the length of a man's little finger. So swift are the 

 functions of its wee body that, deprived of food for 

 six hours, the shrew starves and dies. Many of them 

 are found starved to death on the melting snow, 

 having crept up from their underground burrows 

 through the shafts made by grass and weed-stems. 

 Wandering over the white waste, they lose their way 



