for the skunk. He must needs be a villain and a 

 chicken thief who smells thus to heaven. Yet in 

 faft there are bolder thieves in town than he, with 

 more sinister designs on the hen-roost. It is im- 

 polite to mention him, as though his name were 

 as unsavory as his odor. Men deal more kindly 

 with his memory, for he is permitted to undergo 

 a commercial transfiguration, to rise triumphant 

 from the vat, henceforth to be taken to our bosoms 

 as Alaska sable. 



The skunk receives no credit for the countless 

 beetles he grubs from the earth. No more does 

 the mole who suffers for the sins of the meadow- 

 mouse. They are victims of prejudice. When I 

 see a mole emerge from the earth, I feel I am 

 looking upon an inhabitant of another sphere 

 the underworld; one as strange to me as I am to 

 him. What use has he for the sun ? He cares not 

 for celestial light, but for subterranean fires only. 



In the pond above the glen is a colony of 

 muskrats. It antedates the memory of the oldest 

 inhabitants, and the muskrats were in all proba- 

 bility the first settlers themselves. The huts, which 

 lie scattered through the sedge and cattails, are 

 some of them flat while others are high and dome- 

 150 



