worm-casts,--revealing the larders of the smaller birds. At an average,
too, of four or five places in an acre one notices a hillock two or
three feet in diameter tipped with a yellowish spot that deepens into
orange and broadens as the air grows warm. These erections are the work
of ants, the emergence of which intelligent insects in greater or less
numbers, according to the temperature, causes the coloring which we
observe. Intelligent we cannot help terming a creature so remarkable in
its various species for the evidences of calculation furnished by its
habits of life,--evidences nowhere better worth studying than among the
leaf-cutting, slave-holding, and shade-planting ants of Texas; but we
are sometimes tempted to deny the character to this particular species
when we perceive the utter indifference to safety with which it selects
a site for its communistic abode. One of these is located in the middle
of the principal (sandy and unpaved) street of a village, within twenty
steps of the railroad-track, and subject to the impact of wheels and
mule-, ox-, or horse-hoof many times an hour; yet the semblance of a
dwelling is maintained, and the little tawny cloud comes up smiling
whenever the sun allows, asking no other permission. These ant-hills, I
am persuaded, supply a foundation to certain tufts of low trees which
spring up in dampish places where the spring fires have less sweep. The
hillocks are well drained, as appears from their composition of clear
gravel, a material of which you will find more in one of them than on a
surface of many feet around; and you may see the sweeter grasses
gradually mantling them, these being followed by herbage of larger
growth, which, accumulating humors at their roots, bourgeon into
arborescence, until, one vegetable entity shouldered into substance and
thrift by another, the nucleus built by our tiny red friends has
broadened into a tree-clad knoll. The mezquit, not many years ago
confined for the most part to the arid region beyond the Nueces, is
spreading eastward, and the clumps of it which begin to skirt the