342 HOME OF THE UROTRICHUS. 



as a background, are the mighty hills of the 

 Cascade range, their misty summits capped with 

 perpetual snow their craggy sides rent into 

 chasms and ravines, whose depths and solitudes 

 no man's foot has ever trodden, and clad up to 

 the very snow-line with mighty pine and cedar- 

 trees. The Chilukweyuk river already referred 

 to washes one side of the prairie. Silvery-green 

 and ever-trembling cotton-wood trees, ruddy 

 black-birch, and hawthorn, like a girdle, encircle 

 the prairie, and form a border, of Nature's own 

 weaving, to the brilliant carpet of emerald grass, 

 patterned with wild flowers of every hue and 

 tint, all shading pleasantly away, and losing 

 their brilliancy in the dark green pine-trees. 



In the sandy banks on the edge of the Chiluk- 

 weyuk river, and the various little streams wind- 

 ing through the prairie-grass, lives the Urotrichus. 

 His mansion is a large hole, lined with bits of 

 grass, and this hole is his sleeping-room and 

 drawing-room. A genuine bachelor, he never 

 dines at home. He has lots of roads tunnelled 

 away from his central mansion, radiating from it 

 like the spokes of a wheel. His tunnels are not 

 at all like those of the mole ; he never throws up 

 mounds or heaps of earth, in order to get rid of 

 the surplus material he digs out, as the mole does, 



