THe Lay of the Band 
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? The 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 
