end."

* * * * *

Now a woodchuck, fat from a summer's feeding, climbs heavily to a tree
stump and seats himself to pass the morning in his favorite avocation
of doing nothing. He worked during the night or the very early
morning, for fresh dirt lay at the entrance to his hole. Evidently he
had been enlarging it for the winter. Like a Plato at his philosophies
he sits now, slowly moving his head from side to side, as if steeping
his senses in the beauty of the world around him so that all the
dreams of his long winter sleep shall be pleasant. A persistent fly, a
slap, and the woodchuck hears. He turns that dark gray, solemn looking
face, and asks mutely, reproachfully, perhaps resentfully, why his
reverie has been disturbed. Then he hastily scurries to his burrow and
he will not again appear though I sit here all day.

[Illustration: "HE TURNS THAT SOLEMN FACE" (p. 71)]

From a hole in the side of a fallen log the chipmunk peeps warily,
comes out quickly, but whisks back again in fancied fright. Soon he
returns and sits on the log awhile, barking his bird-like "chip,
chip," and flirting his tail with each note. Then he sets about
gathering the old oak leaves which were piled near the log by the
winds last March and have lain undisturbed through the summer.
Grabbing two or three in his mouth, he pushes them into his pouches
with his paws and is gone into his hole like a flash. The hole in the
log is the entrance to the long passageway which goes down
perpendicularly for three feet, and then gradually ascends, until at a
distance of eight feet it is about a foot below the surface of the