Sometimes in dealing with vermin the farmer resorts neither to unmitigated severity nor to unbounded indulgence, but aims at adopting a judicious compromise between the two; kind but firm, he tempers severity with mercy. An ancient Greek treatise on farming advises the husbandman who would rid his lands of mice to act thus: “Take a sheet of paper and write on it as follows: ‘I adjure you, ye mice here present, that ye neither injure me nor suffer another mouse to do so. I give you yonder field’ (here you specify the field); ‘but if ever I catch you here again, by the Mother of the Gods I will rend you in seven pieces.’ Write this, and stick the paper on an unhewn stone in the field before sunrise, taking care to keep the written side uppermost.”(409) Sometimes the desired object is supposed to be attained by treating with high distinction one or two chosen individuals of the obnoxious species, while the rest are pursued with relentless rigour. In the East Indian island of Bali, the mice which ravage the rice-fields are caught in great numbers, and burned in the same way that corpses are burned. But two of the captured mice are allowed to live, and receive a little packet of white linen. Then the people bow down before them, as before gods, and let them go.(410) In some parts of Bohemia the peasant, though he kills field mice and gray mice without scruple, always spares white mice. If he finds a white mouse he takes it up carefully, and makes a comfortable bed for it in the window; for if it died the luck of the house would be gone, and the gray mice would multiply fearfully in the house.(411) When caterpillars invaded a vineyard or field in Syria, the virgins were gathered, and one of the caterpillars was taken and a girl made its mother. Then they bewailed and buried it. Thereafter they conducted the “mother” to the place where the caterpillars were, consoling her, in order that all the caterpillars might leave the garden.(412) On the 1st of September, Russian girls “make small coffins of turnips and other vegetables, enclose flies and other insects in them, and then bury them with a great show of mourning.”(413)