NATURE LORE 



December. Snow warms and fertilizes. How it 

 warmed up and quickened the mice beneath it! The 

 meadows yielded double their usual number of 

 meadow mice. Never have I seen in the spring evi- 

 dence of such a crop. Over a wide area, wherever 1 

 looked in meadow bottoms or grassy hillsides or 

 shaven lawns, there were the runways, the grassy 

 nests, the camping-grounds of this vast army of 

 meadow mice. They had evidently had a long 

 picnic. They had had the world under there all to 

 themselves. There had been nothing there to molest 

 or to make them afraid, no fox, no cat, no owl, 

 no weasel, no mink, and they had reveled in their 

 freedom and security. One could read it all in the 

 record upon the ground: their straw villages, their 

 round tunnels and sunken runways through the 

 grass, and the marks and refuse everywhere, as of 

 temporary social and holiday gatherings. Vast num- 

 bers of bushes and small trees, especially of the 

 apple order, were stripped of their bark to a height 

 of two or more feet from the ground. I even saw a 

 thicket of small young locusts with stems as white 

 as bleached cornstalks. Spring quickly put an end 

 to these winter festivities of the mice and compelled 

 them to take to their old retreats and darkened lives 

 under the ground. Evidently the old mother, in this 

 part of the country at least, took good care of her 

 children last winter, from grass and tree-roots to 

 mice and insects. 



15 



