these very hazel boughs only yesterday, _i.e._ in May, looking for
cuckoo-sorrel, as the wood-sorrel is called, there rolled down a brown
last year's nut from among the moss of the bank. In the side of this
little brown nut, at its thicker end, a round hole had been made with a
sharp tool which had left the marks of its chiselling. Through this hole
the kernel had been extracted by the skilful mouse. Two more nuts were
found on the same bank, bored by the same carpenter. The holes looked as
if he had turned the nut round and round as he gnawed. Unless the nut had
shrunk, the hole was not large enough to pull the kernel out all at once;
it must have been eaten little by little in many mouthfuls. The same
amount of nibbling would have sawn a circle round the nut, and so,
dividing the shell in two, would have let the kernel out bodily--a plan
more to our fancy; but the mouse is a nibbler, and he preferred to
nibble, nibble, nibble. Hard by one afternoon, as the cows were lazily
swishing their tails coming home to milking, and the shadow of the thick
hedge had already caused the anemones in the grass to close their petals,
there was a slight rustling sound. Out into the cool grass by some
cowslips there came a small dark head. It was an adder, verily a snake in
the grass and flowers. His quick eye--you know the proverb, 'If his ear
were as quick as his eye, No man should pass him by'--caught sight of us
immediately, and he turned back. The hedge was hollow there, and the
mound grown over with close-laid, narrow-leaved ivy. The viper did not
sink in these leaves, but slid with a rustling sound fully exposed above
them. His grey length and the chain of black diamond spots down his back,
his flat head with deadly tooth, did not harmonise as the green snake
does with leaf and grass. He was too marked, too prominent--a venomous
foreign thing, fit for tropic sands and nothing English or native to our
wilds. He seemed like a reptile that had escaped from the glass case of
some collection.