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have to live in their grubby, dirty, silly little houses for a bit
longer. It's very evident we can't go on with this."
And the Cossar children left that great house unfinished, a mere hole of
foundations and the beginning of a wall, and sulked back to their big
enclosure. After a time the hole was filled with water and with
stagnation and weeds, and vermin, and the Food, either dropped there by
the sons of Cossar or blowing thither as dust, set growth going in its
usual fashion. Water voles came out over the country and did infinite
havoc, and one day a farmer caught his pigs drinking there, and
instantly and with great presence of mind--for he knew: of the great hog
of Oakham--slew them all. And from that deep pool it was the mosquitoes
came, quite terrible mosquitoes, whose only virtue was that the sons of
Cossar, after being bitten for a little, could stand the thing no
longer, but chose a moonlight night when law and order were abed and
drained the water clean away into the river by Brook.
But they left the big weeds and the big water voles and all sorts of big
undesirable things still living and breeding on the site they had
chosen--the site on which the fair great house of the little people
might have towered to heaven ...
IV.
That had been in the boyhood of the Sons, but now they were nearly men,
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