The Bat

Reading in bed, full of sentiment for the mild evening and the children asleep in adjacent rooms, hearing them cry out now and then the brief reports of sufficient imagination, and listening at the same time compassionately to the scrabble of claws, the fast treble in the chimney— then it was out, not a trapped bird beating at the seams of the ceiling, but a bat lifting toward us, falling away. Dominion over every living thing, large brain, a choice of weapons—