“How his little black, beadlike eyes glistened as they fell upon that frail membrane of a wing fluttering on the beam!  He darted forward, straight and swift as a weaver’s shuttle, seized the delicate wing in his strong white teeth, and dragged the baby bat from her hiding place.  Baby as she was, she was game.  For one moment she sat up and chattered angry defiance, in a voice like the winding of a watch, but so thin and high-pitched that only a fine ear could have caught it.  Then the mouse seized her, bit her tiny neck through, and dragged her off, sprawling limply, along the beam.”

The Child nodded vigorously.  He needed nothing more to convince him of the superior security of a life of travel and adventure, as compared with the truly appalling perils of staying at home.

“I see you take me!” said Uncle Andy approvingly.  “But this, as you will observe, was not Little Silk Wing, but his sister.  For Little Silk Wing life became now more interesting.  Having only one baby left, his mother was able to carry him with her wherever she went.  And she would not have left him alone again for the world, lest the unknown but dreadful fate which had befallen his sister should overtake him also.

“He was old enough and wide awake enough by this time to appreciate his advantages.  He could feel the thrill of his mother’s long, swinging swoops through the dewy coolness of the dusk.  He could thrill in sympathy with her excitement of the chase, when she went fluttering up into the thin pallor of the upper air, following inexorably the desperate circlings of some high-flying cockchafer.  When she dropped like lead to snap up some sluggish night moth, its wings were not yet quite dry from the chrysalis, as he clung to the swaying grass tops, his tiny eyes sparkled keenly.  And when she went zigzagging, with breathless speed and terrifying violence, to evade the noiseless attack of the brown owl, he hung on to her neck with the tenacity of despair and imagined that their last hour had come.  But it hadn’t, for his mother was clever and expert.  She had fooled many owls in her day.

“This adventurous life of his, of course, was lived entirely at night.  During the day he slept, for the most part, folded in his mother’s wing membranes, while she hung by her toes from the edge of a warped board in the warm goldy-brown shadows of the peak of the old barn.  Outside, along the high ridge pole, swallows, king birds, jays, and pigeons gathered under the bright blue day to scream, chatter or coo their ideas of life, each according to the speech of its kind.  And sometimes a cruel-eyed, hook-beaked, trim, well-bred looking hawk would perch there on the roof—­quite alone, let me tell you—­and gaze around as if wondering where all the other birds could have gone to!  And once in a while also a splendid white-headed eagle would come down out of the blue, and wing low over the barn, and scream his thin, terrifying yelp, as if he were