Up the bank he pattered, and into that, to him, great subterranean highway which seems to be conjointly kept up and used by all the mysterious little four-footed tribes of the field, and which runs the length of practically every bank and hedgerow.  The place was dark and cool and echoing, and bare as the palm of your hand, and far cleaner than many palms.  It might have been cleaned out that very day by a fairy vacuum-cleaner; but it hadn’t.  It was always like that, clean as the proverbial new pin.  Heaven alone knows who did the “charing” there, but those little furry tribes might have given lessons on health in trench warfare, I reckon, at a guinea a time—­and cheap at that.  They had found out that dirt meant disease, you bet.

Down that tunnel drummed the bank-vole, seeking to foul his trail with just any other creature; and, the highway being, as I have said, a sort of public affair, he met first a mouse gone astray, then a mole asleep, then a long-tailed wood-mouse, then a short-tailed field-vole, then a shrew about as big as your little finger.  But they must have heard the scrape of the snake’s scales down that echoing tunnel following hard behind, for they avoided our bank-vole like the plague, and dived up one or other of the thousand and one side-tunnels, which opened on to the main one, too quickly for the viper to catch them.

Then the poor, little, panting bank-vole found himself once more in the open.  His beady eyes shone like microscopic stars as lie paused in a copper bar of setting sunlight and looked about for a refuge.  It seemed, by the piston-like throb of the whole body, that his heart would burst and slay him out of hand before the hated snake could, if he did not jolly soon find one.

Then a hedge caught his eye, and he climbed it, being a good acrobat in his spare time.  Beyond, however, bringing down upon himself the pecks of several birds, he did no good, for it seemed that, whithersoever he could go, the snake could follow, and—­help!—­the flat, terrible head was not a yard from him now.

Worse was to follow, though.  He dropped to earth again, already a beaten beast; and, to complete the catastrophe, by a miracle he had landed where there was not a mouse or mole or vole hole, or any other cover, within reach.  Only one big clod of earth there was, and round that he flung himself, with that stub, scaly snout weaving at his very tail, and rolled over and over and over—­done, too utterly spent even to squeak.

Then Fate lifted her finger, and things happened.  All that had gone before didn’t count, it seemed.

The little bank-vole was dimly aware of rolling under a big, warm, live shape.  He was also aware of a funny little fussy grunt in his ear, and that a set of very white and business-like teeth flashed for an instant in the sun, as they chopped surprisedly at him going under them, and missed.  Thereafter the shape sat down, nearly stifling him; and in the same instant the whole air seemed to fill with the sudden, long-drawn, venomous, terrifying hiss of the viper close at hand.  Evidently the limbless death had come round the corner too quickly, and had all but rammed the shape that grunted.