THE LONG-TAILED FIELD MOUSE. 
385 
Short-tailed Field Mouse in the hedges while ‘ bat-fowling ’ at 
night for small birds. He has also found that when the Mouse 
eats hips, it nibbles off one end and extracts the seeds, rejecting 
the husks as uneatable. Man, however, acts in just the reverse 
manner, rejecting the seeds with their cottony envelopes, and 
eating the sweet husk, or sometimes boiling it up with sugar 
and making it into a conserve. 
The cherry-stones are mostly obtained through the agency of 
blackbirds, thrushes, and other feathered fruit lovers. These 
birds pluck the cherries, often leaving the stones adhering 
slightly to the stalks, or dropping them on the ground. In the 
former case the stones are sure to be flung down when the legi- 
timate owner gathers the fruit, so that the Mouse who is fortm 
nate enough to live in a cherry-growing district is sure of a 
winter stock of food. Several hundred cherry-stones are some- 
times placed in a single storehouse, affording sustenance to 
several mice. 
The animal eats them in a peculiar manner. Instead of split- 
ting them open by using the chisel-edged teeth or wedges, after 
the manner of schoolboys opening nuts and peach-stones with 
their pocket-knives, the Mouse nibbles off one end of the stone 
so as to make a little hole, and through this small aperture it 
contrives to extract the solid kernel. 
The Long-tailed Field Mouse or Wood Mouse (Mus syl- 
vaticus) also makes a winter nest, in which it lives, but to which 
it does not absolutely confine itself, making several nests in the 
course of a season, and selecting such spots as appear to please 
its fancy at the time. Mr. Briggs remarks that he has known 
one of these mice to make a nest in three days. 
One species of Field Mouse sometimes does good service to 
mankind, through its habits of storing up its winter stock of 
provisions. Lately in the country about Odessa vast armies of 
mice were seen, and evidently did much damage. Not only did 
they eat the crops, but they swarmed into the houses in such 
numbers that traps could hardly be set fast enough, twenty or 
thirty being often taken in a single day. 
Hurtful though they were in some senses, they nevertheless 
