49 
much resembles a very light brown sugar, containing so much moisture 
that you may thrust your cane into it, and withdrawing, leave a hole. 
We find an entrance to the burrow, which has a hallway perhaps three 
feet wide and tapering in eighteen inches, with a downward slant to the 
opening proper; here we come to an arch, one-third of a circle, over a 
horizontal base which measures fourteen inches; we take a long rod and 
thrust down the incline and find it goes eight feet at an angle of forty- 
five degrees and then turns; we lay the rod on top of the ground in the 
same direction, and dig a foot or two beyond our measure, then down, and 
strike the hole; from this point the burrow changes direction twice, but 
always an easy incline downward, the sand gradually becoming more 
damp as we proceed. After we had made a trench some twelve feet from 
the entrance large enough to stand and work in, and six feet deep, I asked 
Henry how far he thought we must go before we got the gopher. ‘‘Well, 
we must jist go on dis road till we git him, if it takes a hundred yards.” 
After digging four feet more and still down, Henry handed up a bleached 
cockroach, remarking, ‘““We’s most’ got um; here’s one of his ‘familiars,’ 
and when we come to de white frog we’s got um shore.’ Sure enough 
it was so, for the spade went four feet more and we could hear it grate 
on the shell; at the same time a white frog jumped out. It was a bright- 
eyed little fellow, with transparent legs and toes. A few black specks 
about his head made a pretty contrast to his sparkling gold-ringed iris. 
“Hold on, Henry,’ I said, “let me pull out that gopher; I fear you will 
seratch him with the spade.” ‘You can’t pull him out wid an ox team,” 
was the reply. ‘Well, get out of my way and I will show you; he can 
have no purchase in this wet sand.” So in I went, ‘belly flat,’ as the 
boys say when coasting, squeezing myself into the hole until I got my 
hand on the shell. There were no hind legs to be found, and the wet oval 
shell was so slippery I had to give it up and be drawn out myself by the 
legs. “ll show you how to get ’im widout scratchin’ de shell,” said 
Henry, and he proceeded to make a cave under the gopher. Into this he 
dropped, was scouped out and handed over. We had dug twenty feet, 
making the gopher’s hole twenty-eight feet long and eight deep. In Indi- 
ana soil we would have had a half day’s job to make this excavation, 
which, in this soft moist soil, required one hour and a quarter. The 
pointed, scouped spade used can be pushed into the soft sand without 
using the foot to propel it. 
4—Science. 
