A TELLING TAIL. 
So was moving among the grass. 
What it was were hard to say, for numer- 
ous somethings had been moving among the 
grass all night, and now, even long after 
sun-up, were not still. They were field-mice, 
many and little—so many that the ground all 
about was honeycombed and spongy with 
their burrows, and so little that you never, 
unless you set a trap, saw one at all. 
This something, however, was different. You 
could see zt. And as it moved into the full sun, 
you would have cried,‘Oh! Asnake! Keep 
your eye on it while I get a stick to kill it.’ 
Nevertheless you would have been wrong. It 
was no snake. Long—about fifteen and three- 
quarter inches—narrow, legless, like reddish 
metal atop, and dirty white below, it was so 
perfect an imitation of a snake that few would 
have known the difference. 
Then it flicked out a tongue and whipped 
up a tiny tin-green insect from a leaf, and one 
saw that the tongue was notched only, and 
not forked as in real snakes. And then it 
shut its eyelids and went to sleep, and one 
knew instantly that it really could not be what 
it seemed, for snakes have no eyelids to shut, 
