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House Mouse 
Bwn, especially on the face and shoulders, dusky on the 
4; below paler gray, sometimes suffused with buff. 
Range. Cosmopolitan. Introduced into America from the Old 
world. 
I have in another place alluded to the house mouse as a 
foreigner; but, as a matter of fact, it is no more of a foreigner 
than are the descendants of the very first settlers in this country, 
English or Dutch. Its ancestors came across with the earliest of 
them, and while the white people were still but campers and 
squatters on the borders of a bewildering forest of unknown 
extent the youngest of these little hangers-on could already count 
grand-parents and great grand-parents of American birth, so that 
reckoning by generations there were even then American mice. 
Still, it would hardly be safe to conclude that all or even 
any considerable portion of the mice that inhabit our dwellings at 
present are descended from these first-comers. 
Immigration and emigration have proved as popular among 
them as with members of the human race, and every ship that 
crosses the Atlantic bears, among other things, its humble cargo 
of mice from one shore to the other, so that some of those 
which even now are nibbling at our pastry or the bindings of 
books may very possibly have spent the first part of the season in 
England or on the Continent, and just as possibly will be there 
again next year. 
Mice were originally natives of Southern Asia. From there 
they have accompanied man in his wanderings to all parts of 
the world, travelling, as he has travelled, in ox-teams and on 
the backs of donkeys, by steamship and railway; taking up their 
quarters wherever he does, first in log cabins with thatched 
roofs, and finally, in some instances, on the nineteenth floor of 
a steel building where generation after generation may live and 
die in turn without having so much as touched foot to the 
earth. 
Strangely enough ihe race seems to be proof against the 
-hanges wrought upon most animals by difference of environment. 
specimens from the opposite sides of the globe, or from widely 
eparated latitudes, are said to be practically indistinguishable, as 
“at last the species had hit upon a style of form and colouring, 
erfectly suited to all conditions of life. 
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