220 EDGE OF THE JUNGLE 
like a magnet to the fierce little face. Once I 
tried the experiment of a bit of blunted bent wire 
on a long piece of thread, and at the very first 
cast I entangled a flutter-mouse and pulled him 
in. I was aghast when I saw what I had cap- 
tured. A body hardly as large as that of a mouse 
was topped with the head of a fiend incarnate. 
Between his red puffed lips his teeth showed 
needle-sharp and ivory-white; his eyes were as 
evil as a caricature from Simplicissimus, and set 
deep in his head, while his ears and nose were 
monstrous with fold upon fold of skinny flaps. 
It was not a living face, but a mask of frightful 
mobility. 
I set him free, deeming anything so ugly well 
worthy of life, if such could find sustenance 
among his fellows and win a mate for himself 
somewhere in this world. But he, for all his 
hideousness and unseemly mien, is not the vam- 
pire; the blood-sucking bat has won a mantle of 
deceit from the hands of Nature—a garb that 
gives him a modest and not unpleasing appear- 
ance, and makes it a difficult matter to distin- 
guish him from his guileless confréres of our 
summer evenings. 
But in the tropics,—the native land of the 
