Rabbits were another great nuisance. They had burrows among the tree-roots on the river bank and no one seemed able to get them out or to shoot them, so between what they ate and what they dug up, we hadn't much pleasure in the garden. At last we cut off so much of the garden as we could surround with wire netting and left the rest to take its chance. No sooner had we done this than, for what reason I cannot tell, the rabbits disappeared completely, and for two or three years we hardly ever saw one on our own ground, though they seemed to be as plentiful as usual elsewhere. We have sometimes caught long-tailed field-mice that were eating the peas, and the cats seemed to find voles and shrews pretty often. I must confess to rather a weakness for common mice; they are pretty to look at and amusing in their ways. To give an instance of their ingenuity and enterprise, I remember some time in the summer of 1899, when we used to have a basin of sugar left in our room at night, a certain mouse appeared to think that it was placed there for his own special benefit, at any rate he was accustomed to help himself very freely to it. We could hear him working away to get a lump over the side of the basin, then rolling it along to the edge of the table and letting it fall to the floor, along which he would again roll it to a hole under the skirting-board. Sometimes he would take in this way as many as three or four lumps of sugar in one night. Besides the sugar there was often bread and butter left in the room between two plates, and one morning when I took the top one off out jumped the mouse. I cannot imagine how it got in. It certainly couldn't make its way out again, which one should have thought a far easier thing to do. The plates seemed to be exactly as I had left them the night before, and I could not see that any of the bread and butter had been eaten.