closely as to suggest that their owners imagined land was scarce in the
neighborhood. It wasn't. For hundreds of miles in every direction the
plains stretched away to the dim horizon. There was room everywhere,
nothing much, in fact, _but_ room, with a little coarse grass and
plenty of clear air. But the population went in for crowding by
preference, and didn't care a cactus whether it was hygienic or not.

"The houses were ail underground, each with a rounded hillock of earth
beside its front door; and the size of these hillocks was an indication
of the size of the houses beneath, for they were all formed by the
earth brought to the surface in the process of excavating the rooms and
passages. On the tops of these hillocks the owners sat up in the sun
to bark and chatter and gossip with their nearest neighbors, always
ready to dive headlong down their front doors, with a twinkling of
their hind feet, at the approach of danger,

"But if the village was large, the Little Villager himself was
decidedly small. Some twelve or fifteen inches in length from the tip
of his innocent-looking nose to the end of his short and quite
undistinguished-looking tail, he seldom had occasion to stretch himself
out to his full length, and therefore he seldom got the credit of such
inches as he actually possessed. His ears were short and rounded, his
eyes were large, softly bright, and as innocent-looking as his nose.
His body was plump and rounded, and he looked almost as much a baby
when quite grown up as he had looked when he was still a responsibility
to his talkative little mother. In color he was of a grayish-brown on
top, and of a dingy white underneath, with a black tip to his tail to
give a finish which his costume would otherwise have lacked.

"Except for unimportant variations in size, there was perhaps some