“These little creatures are to be found in fields and meadows and gardens, and in winter they come near our houses and make their nests under straw-stacks and dung-heaps. In very cold weather they even find their way into stables, where they live on cockroaches and wood-lice; but at the approach of summer they are off again to the open fields, where they complete the mole’s work of extermination. Or they may seek some garden, where they protect the wall-fruit and the vegetable patches from the devouring insect hordes without ever touching any of the growing crops themselves. The teeth of the shrew-mouse are not made for the chewing of vegetable food; like the mole, this tiny creature is carnivorous. Moreover, in their hunting-raids, which are so greatly to our advantage, shrew-mice never do us the slightest injury of any sort, as they never bore tunnels, but merely use the natural cracks in the soil. They cannot be reproached with severing roots or throwing up mounds of earth, as moles do; and yet they are perhaps more an object of general execration than the latter. It is considered a praiseworthy act to crush them every time one gets a chance. “How has so tiny, pleasing, and useful a creature managed thus to incur the hatred of man? We have here, my children, another instance of the foolish way we accept the first notion that enters our heads, without trying to test it by observation and reason. It is said that the shrew-mouse bites horses’ feet and leaves incurable wounds. But how can a shrew-mouse, whose head is at most no larger than a pea, bite a horse and pierce its hide which is the thickness of a finger or more? Again, they say the shrew-mouse is venomous even for man. Some time ago, children, I told you about the viper. [2] You know what its weapons are,—two long, sharp teeth or fangs having little channels through which it introduces a drop of venom into the wound it inflicts. Well, I assure you the shrew-mouse has no weapon like the viper’s; it has neither fangs nor a poison-sac, but is wholly harmless to man and horse. Insects alone need fear its fine teeth,—not that they are poisoned in any way, but because they crunch their little victims very neatly. “I think I see why the shrew-mouse has incurred the charge of being venomous. The pretty little creature exhales an odor; it smells rather strongly of musk. The cat, taking it for a mouse, sometimes chases it, but, repelled by its odor, never eats it. The first to observe this fact said to himself: ‘As the cat does not dare eat it the shrew-mouse must be venomous.’ Ever since then this false belief has passed for truth in the country, and no one has taken the trouble to look into the matter more closely; so that the poor little shrew-mouse, one of our most useful and harmless helpers, falls a victim to the stupidity of man, whose gardens it protects.” CHAPTER XI THE EXPLOIT OF ONE-EYED JOHN