86 THE BOOK OF A NATURALIST 
- Se 
stop him, but he dived past the stick and got 
away where he wanted to be in the wood, and I 
resumed my seat. 
There was the toad, when I looked his way, just 
about where I had last seen him, within perhaps a 
few inches. Then a turtle-dove flew down, alighting 
within a yard of the water, and after eyeing me 
suspiciously for a few moments advanced and took 
one long drink and flew away. A few minutes later 
I heard a faint complaining and whining sound in 
or close to the hedge on my left hand, and turning 
my eyes in that direction caught sight of a stoat, 
his head and neck visible, peeping at me out of the 
wood; he was intending to cross the road, and seeing 
me sitting there hesitated to do so. Still having 
come that far he would not turn back, and by and 
by he drew himself snake-like out of the concealing 
herbage, and was just about to make a dash across 
the road when I tapped sharply on the wood with 
my stick and he fled back into cover. In a few 
seconds he appeared again, and I played the same 
trick on him with the same result; this was 
repeated about four times, after which he plucked 
up courage enough to make his dash and was 
quickly lost in the coarse grass by the stream on 
the other side. 
Then a curious thing happened: flop, flop, flop, 
went vole following vole, escaping madly from their 
hiding-places along the bank into the water, all 
swimming for dear life to the other side of the 
stream. Their deadly enemy did not swim after 
