A HILLSIDE COTTAGE 185 



Perhaps the most engaging of all the creatures who 

 frequent the plot regularly are the mice. Mice, of course, 

 are villains. They eat nightingales eggs and the tips of 

 young trees and flower stems and bulbs. Some, indeed, 

 hold the mouse or ratten to be as bad as the tribe of rat ; 

 but whatever their morals at certain times and places, 

 they keep a merry mien. One woodmouse with ears as 

 big as a bat s usually skirts along a cloister of the bracken 

 before venturing on the open, but the dawdling is no 

 more than a mannerism. He runs out into the open with 

 a gait all his own. You would think he was on wheels, 

 and begins his retreat in the same manner, but changes 

 to a jerboa as he nears the bracken and leaps into hiding. 

 He is the merriest of the mice, though not as pretty as 

 the dormouse, which here, as a boy complained of his 

 caged mouse, &quot; has no habits/* How like a squirrel is 

 almost any mouse when it feeds. It will hold a nut 

 squirrel-wise and cut or gnaw off an opening with more 

 than a squirrel s neatness. Life in the cottage has not a 

 dull moment when the mice are feeding and their ways, 

 like the ways of a playing child, breed laughter. As 

 Keats sang of his squirrels : 



So many and so merry, and such glee* 



The birds found out the cottage almost as soon as the 

 builders got to work. The walls were certainly not four 

 feet high when a pair of robins built in the fire-place 

 which had advanced rather more quickly than the rest. 

 In anticipatory congruence with the spirit of the place 

 the masons took supreme care to respect these first in 

 habitants, and the two houses rose simultaneously. It 

 seemed likely that a family would be in being there before 

 the roof was on ; but after all, the dust and noise proved 

 too much, and the pair left their nest and eggs for a 



