_ The Singing Mouse came out and sat upon my knee. It fixed its small red eye upon me, and lifted its tiny paws, so thin the fire shone through them. And it sang.... Like the voice of some night-wandering bird of melody, hid high in the upper realms of darkness, came faint sweet notes falling softly down. It was as if from the deep air above, and from the wide air around, there were dropping and drifting small links of silken steel, gentle but strong, so that one were helpless even had one wished to move. To listen was also to see.
There were low rolling hills, covered and crowned with a thick growth of hazel thickets and short oaks. Between these hills ran long strips of green, strung on tiny bands of silver. And as these bands moved and thickened and braided themselves together, I seemed to see a procession of the trees. The cottonwoods halted in their march. The box-elders, and maples, and water-elms, and walnuts and such big trees swept grandly in with waving banners, and wound on and on in long procession, even down to two blue distant hills set at the edge of the world, unpassed guardians of a land of dreams. Ah, well-a-day! I look back at those two hills now, and the land of dreams lies still beyond them, it is true; but it is now upon the side whence I first gazed. It is back there, where one can not go again; back there, along that crystal, murmuring mystery of the little stream one knew when one was young!
Ah, little river, little river, but I am coming back again. Once more I push away the long grass and the swinging boughs, and look into your face. Again I dabble my bare feet, and scoop up my straw hat full, and watch the tiny streams run down. Again I stand, bare and small and trembling, wondering if I can swim across. And--listen, little river--again at the same old place I shall cut me the willow wand, and down the long slope to the certain place I knew I am going to hurry, running the last quarter of a mile in sheer expectation, but forgetting not the binding on of the tough linen line. And now I cast my gaudy float on that same swinging, wimpling, dimpling eddy, and let it swim in beneath the bank. And--No! Can it be? Have I here, now, again, plainly in my hands, the strange and wonderful creature, the gift of the little stream? Is this its form, utterly lovable? Is this its coat, wrought of cloth of gold and silver? Are these diamonds its eyes?... Oh, little river, little river, give me back this gift to keep for ever! Why take such things from us?... All I have I will give to you, if you will but give back to me, to have by me all the time, this little fish from the pool beneath the boughs. I have hunted well for him, believe me, hard and faithfully in many a place, but he is no longer there. I find him no longer, even in the remotest spots I search.... But this is he! This, in my hands, here in actual sight, is my first, my glorious, iridescent, radiant prize! Pray you, behold the glittering!
But along this little river there were other things when the leaves grew brown. In those low, easy hills strange creatures dwelt. Birds of brown plumage and wondrous, soul-startling burst of wing. Large gray creatures, a foot long or longer, with light tread on the leaves, and long ears that went a-peak when you whistled to them. Were ever such beings before in any land? For the pursuit of these, it seems, one must have boots with copper toes, made waterproof by abundant tallow. There must be a vast game-bag--a world too large for a boyish form--and strange things to eat therein, such as one sees no longer; for on a chase calling for such daring-do it may be needful that one walk far, across the hills, along the little river, almost to the Delectable Mountains themselves. Again I see it all. Again I follow through the hills that same tall, tireless figure with the grave and kindly face. Again I wonder at the uncomprehended skill which brought whirling down ten out of the dozen of those brown lightning balls. Again I rejoice, beyond all count or measure, over the first leporine murder committed by myself, the same furthered by means of a rest on a forked tree. It seems to me I groan secretly again at the weight of that great gun before the night has come. I almost wince again at the pulling off of those copper-toed boots at night, there by the kitchen stove, after the chase is done. But, ah! how happy I am again, holding up for the gaze of a kind pair of eyes this great, gray creature with the lopping ears.
Now, as we walk by the banks of this magic river, I would that it might be always as it was in the earliest days. I like best to think myself mistaken when I suspect a greater stoop in this once familiar form which knew these hills and woods so well. It can not be that the quick eye has grown less bright. Yet why was the last mallard missed? And tell me, is not the old dog ranging as widely as once he did? Can it be that he keeps closer at heel? Does he look up once in a while, mournfully, with a dimmer eye, at an eye becoming also dimmer--does he walk more slowly, by a step now not so fast? Does he look up--My God!--is there melancholy in a dog's eye, too? _