€^t fia^ of t^^ &a\xi> 



have carried more than one nut at a time, — up the 

 tall boot-leg and down the oily, slippery inside. I 

 should have liked to see her scurrying about the 

 cellar, looking after her curiously difficult harvest. 

 Apparently, they were new nuts to her every evening. 

 Once or twice I came down to find them lying un- 

 touched. The mouse, perhaps, was away over night 

 on other business. But the following night they 

 were all gathered and nicely packed in the boot 

 as before. And as before I sent them sixty ways 

 among the barrels and boxes of the furnace room. 

 But I did it once too often, for it dawned upon 

 the mouse one night that these were the same old 

 nuts that she had gathered now a dozen times ; and 

 that night they disappeared. Where .-^ I wondered. 

 Weeks passed, and I had entirely forgotten about the 

 nuts, when I came upon them, the identical nuts of 

 my boot, tiered carefully up in a corner of the deep, 

 empty water-tank away off in the attic. 



Store.!* xhe mouse had to store. She had to, not 

 to feed her body, — there was plenty in the cellar for 

 that, — but to satisfy her soul. A mouse's soul, that 

 something within a mouse which makes for more than 

 meat, may not be a soul at all, but only a bundle of 



42 



