“The Little Villager sat just where he was for perhaps half a minute, barking with indignation.  Then he followed the impertinent visitors.  As he entered he heard a confused sound of shrill, angry chattering, explosive hissing, and savage snapping of beaks.  Being able to see quite comfortably in the gloom, he distinguished his companion, the lady villager who was at that time occupying the burrow with him, doing her best to make the visitors understand that they were not welcome.  Her language might have seemed clear enough.  She made little rushes at them with open mouth and gnashing teeth, and her tones were just as unpleasant as she knew how to make them.  But the guests confronted her with claws and beaks so ready and so formidable that she did not like to come to close quarters.

“Nor, indeed, when the Little Villager himself arrived was the situation very much altered.  One of the owls turned and faced him, whereupon he, too, lost his resolution and confined himself to threats.  The two owls, for their part, seemed to consider it wise to stand on the defensive rather than to force a battle to a finish with their unwilling hosts.  For some minutes, therefore, the war of threats and bad language went on, without fur or feathers actually flying.  Then at last the Little Villager, who was by nature an easy-going, unresentful soul, chanced to glance aside from his adversary; and it flashed into his mind that, after all, there was some room to spare in the burrow.  Anyhow, he was tired of the argument.  He turned away indifferently and began to nibble at some tough grass stems which he had brought down in case of a rainy day.  Seeing him thus yield the point at issue, his mate was not going to fight it out alone.  She, too, turned her back with ostentatious indifference upon her rude guests, and went out and sat on the top of the hillock to let her feelings calm down.  The pair of owls, well satisfied to have forced themselves upon the Little Villager’s hospitality, huddled together in their own corner, and resumed the nap which had been so unpleasantly interrupted in their previous residence.”

“What was it that interrupted?” broke in the Child, glad that it was not he that could be accused of it, that time.  “What was it that drove them out of their own burrow in such a hurry?”

“It was a big rattlesnake,” answered Uncle Andy, quite politely, remembering that he himself had recently been guilty of an interruption.  “I ought to have explained that before, but I was interested in the Little Villager and forgot it.  It was a big rattlesnake which had got tired of its old hole and taken a fancy to that of the owls.  So the owls had had nothing to do but get out, without even a half-minute to talk over the matter.  And hating to stay out in the full glare of the sun, which was very hard on their eyes, they had invited themselves to live with the Little Villager just because his house was the first they came to.