42 EVERYDAY ADVENTURES 
behind a row of books that stood on the red-oak 
plank which I had put in as a mantel-piece. Un- 
fortunately he had forgotten to hide his long silky 
tail. It hung down through the crack between the 
plank and the rough stone of the chimney. I tip- 
toed over and gave it a pinch to remind him to meddle 
no more with other people’s mattresses. 
Returning to the wood-road — on that morning, 
among the trails of the deer-mice were the more 
numerous tracks of the meadow- or field-mouse. 
They show no tail-mark, and the smaller foot- 
prints were not side by side as with the deer-mice, 
but almost always one behind the other. These 
smaller paw-marks among all jumping-animals, such 
as rabbits, squirrels, and mice, are always the marks 
of the fore-paws. The larger far-apart tracks mark 
where the hind feet of the jumper come down in front 
and outside of the fore-paws as he jumps. 
On that day, among the mouse-tracks on the snow 
there showed another faint trail, which looked like 
a string of tiny exclamation marks with a tail-mark 
between them. It was the track of the masked shrew, 
the smallest mammal of the Eastern states. This 
tiny fierce fragment of flesh and blood is only about 
the length of a man’s little finger. So swift are the 
functions of its wee body that, deprived of food for 
six hours, the shrew starves and dies. Many of them 
are found starved to death on the melting snow, 
having crept up from their underground burrows 
through the shafts made by grass and weed-stems. 
Wandering over the white waste, they lose their way 
