THE MIGHTY DREAD. 215 
yearning was worse than the pain in the roof 
of his inside. 
There was no wife there, however; there 
was not a creature—his sharp nose and 
beautiful sweeping whiskers said so—except 
one half-asleep spider in a window-corner. 
The spider was not so frozen as to prevent it 
from biting him on that same nose when he 
went to eat it, and the formic acid which the 
spider kept in reserve for hectic moments like 
this made him jump quite six inches, and 
squeak so loudly in the echoing silence that 
he was terrified at the magnitude of his own 
voice, and streaked to his hole again quicker 
than one could snap a finger. 
There followed a pause, and then he was 
out in the room again, surveying the wainscot, 
till the door intervened, and he arrived at the 
larder. The larder, however, was only an 
empty space, full of faint smells of food that 
had been; and, almost desperate, he peeped 
out under the back-door. 
It did not fit well, that back-door, and 
there was a draught like several knives coming 
in under it; but any death, he felt, was prefer- 
able to starvation, and at his sixth attempt he 
reached the laurels. 
A blackbird was warning all the world of 
feather to beware of the dark from his holly 
