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 ito 
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, 
