HOW KESTRELS LIVE. 27 
It was the little falcon’s shadow on the 
water that did it, I fancy, or the sudden 
shriek of a tiny tilt-tailed wren higher up. 
Anyway, all that the kestrel got was a splash 
in the face as the ‘meal’ dived into the water. 
Evidently this was not the kestrel’s day. 
Morning passed to afternoon. The kestrel 
still continued to wheel and sweep, and hover 
—foodless. 
Then the long-drawn-out twilight began— 
a thing of hours—when the wind and the rain 
seemed to beget more power than ever. Just 
about then he came to a corn-stack near a 
barn, and a cart-shed planted, or dropped, or 
lost away out in the fields. 
And the stack was literally alive with mice, 
and the mice had some grievance, so that they 
could not refrain from rustling, and squeak- 
ing, and scampering, and trekking in com- 
panies over to the barn. As a fact, some one 
had been ferreting rabbits hard by, and had 
lost a ferret, and the lost one had gone nearly 
mad with slaughter in the stack. 
The kestrel falcon got five mice and one 
young rat—that I know of—before the day 
shut in, and he roosted on a beam in the 
cart-shed adjoining; and goodness knows 
how many more he got next dawn. 
