original copses here may be supposed to owe their first foothold to the
ant. This humble promoter of forestry is duly appreciated, if only as a
viand, by his neighbors. Full-grown, and still more in the larval stage,
he is esteemed by them as both a toothsome and a beaksome bit. He--or,
more numerously, she, if we insist on sex and decline the more
practically correct _it_--forms thus the lowest term in an ascending
series of animal life that grows out of the ant-hill like the tree. So
much may one such settlement in a rood of ground do for the maintenance
of organic existence.

A still more diffused, perhaps, if less productive, source of life
exists in another burrower and mound-builder, the crawfish. Unlike the
ant, which likes to drain, he is an advocate of irrigation. In this art
he can give our well-diggers odds in the game. His genius for striking
water is wonderful. On the dryest parts of the prairie, miles from any
permanent stream, his ejections of mud may be found. Shallow or deep,
his borings always reach water. He is always at home, but less
accessible to callers than the ant. To the smaller birds he is forbidden
fruit. In wet weather, when his vestibule is shallow, the sand-hill
crane may burglarize him, or even get a snap judgment on him at the
front door. The bill of the great curlew cannot be sent in so
effectively, not being so rightly drawn; but that bird, more common in
the season than anywhere else away from the coast, finds plenty of other
food. He is not here in the winter. His place just now is filled by the
jacksnipe, which flutters up from every boggy place and comes to bag in
a condition anything but suggestive of short commons. The snipe's
terrestrial surface lies two and a half inches beneath ours. At that
distance he strikes hard pan; but it is margin enough for his
operations, and he is not often caught among the shorts. Gourmands
assure us that he lives "by suction," and that there is consequently no