beam of wood, blackened with soot, an iron table with a sewing-machine on top, a woman in a long dress.

What!

Potato froze. What was the woman doing? She was very, very quiet, and she didn't move, not even slightly.

Potato didn't know anything about humans that sat so still and stayed awake at night, and never blinked. He waited, and watched, expecting at any moment to jump away when the woman saw him.

But the woman sat as still as a tree trunk, or a rock, until Potato decided she must be stuck that way, and he wasn't so nervous any more. He went on across the floor, sniffing and looking, until he bumped into something very hard, but also very difficult to see. It was glass, but mice don't know that word so they call it something else. Potato knew about that stuff. It was something the humans made. "Frozen air" it was sometimes called, by mice. They had lots of words for things the humans made, but that didn't mean they understood any of it. (You see, having a name for something doesn't usually help to explain it, if you see what I mean?)

Potato ran along the side of the glass, using his whiskers to feel it, until he came to the side of the room. Now he was faced with a wall, with shabby, brown wall-paper on it, and a painting in a heavy, wooden frame hung further up, with a scene of bullocks crossing a river, and a sunset, with flax bushes and a native with a spear and a grass skirt, and a red sunset.

Potato ran along the wall to the back of the room until he found a small gap. He nibbled at it until he could get his head through, and as you know, if a mouse can get his head through a hole, he can get the rest of himself through too. So that is what Potato did, and soon he was trotting along a dark place which smelled of new paint and concrete, until he found a small room with a dripping tap and a plastic rubbish bucket.

"There is something to eat here!" he thought, sniffing the air.

He climbed the leg of a chair and reached the seat, then he went up the back of the chair and jumped on to a flat place. He was close to the dripping tap now, so he had a drink and washed his face. Just above the bench was a small cupboard, though to a mouse it was a huge cupboard, so Potato climbed up on the shiny, metal box with the slots in it (which humans used to burn their bread in), and squeezed his paws into the crack where the door of the cupboard went. It swung open, so into the cupboard he went, and than night he dined on biscuits with butter.