‘All the same, I hate being on the ground,’ said Cob, uneasily glancing round at the steep walls of snow which surrounded the little white pit which we had dug, and at the bottom of which we sat feasting. Rusty uttered a disdainful snort. ‘What’s to hurt us here? A weasel wouldn’t trust himself in this dazzle of snow, and foxes don’t prowl in the daytime, let alone in a sun like this.’ ‘Oh, I know it’s foolish,’ answered Cob humbly. ‘But I’ve been that way ever since the time that I had that escape from——’ His voice died away in a sharp choking gasp. Looking round in some surprise, I saw him staring upwards, a frozen horror in his wide eyes. Following his glance, I saw glaring down upon us through the hedge two cruel green orbs set in a wide grey face. It did not need the short ears, the stiff whiskers, or the rows of sharp white teeth, bared in a hungry grin, to tell me that I was looking upon the terror of the woods, the wild-cat of Merton Spinney. The awful head was hardly a yard away. Its owner had crawled up unseen on the far side of the hedge—that is, inside the coppice, for we were in the ditch outside—and having got wind of us, was endeavouring to creep through unseen and unheard, so as to pounce upon us unawares. It was the lucky chance of our having Cob with us, whose hearing was acute beyond either Rusty’s or my own, that gave us that needful second’s warning. Without it there is no possible doubt but that I should never have been alive to tell this story. One often says ‘quick as a cat,’ but it would be just as correct or more so to say ‘quick as a squirrel’; and I am quite certain that hardly half a second elapsed between the moment I set eyes on the cat’s head emerging from the briers and the bound which landed me six feet out of the hole along the ditch to the left. With the best intentions in the world no one of us could have helped the others, but would only have sacrificed his life uselessly if he had tried to. Thinking over the matter since, I have often wondered why the cat did not pounce straight upon Cob, who has confessed that he was so badly frightened that he never jumped until both Rusty and I were clear out of the hole. The fact remains that she did not do so. A rustle of quickly moved branches, and then a series of soft, padding sounds behind me, proved that I had been selected as her dinner—an attention which, as you may imagine, I could very well have dispensed with. [Illustration: TWO CRUEL GREEN ORBS SET IN A WIDE GREY FACE.]