The Wit of the Wild 



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silvery white, now palest blue, now rosy, and 

 over all arches a perfect sky. 



In this delicious weather, as you stroll about 

 these gable-ends of the roof of the world, you 

 constantly come upon bouquets of flowers, their 

 stems all one way, laid side by side on some 

 warm rock, and you wonder who has picked and 

 arranged them so carefully yet left them to 

 wither ; and then you begin to see little heaps of 

 grass and weeds standing in the sun and turn- 

 ing yellow and dry under its long, hot beams. 

 There may be scores or hundreds of them. 



If your curiosity led to observation you would 

 presently discover that these were near the home 

 of a colony of pikas, which lived in the loose 

 slide-rock, finding their way in winding galleries 

 far into its interior, where each family had a 

 snug nest in some convenient hollow, and that 

 these heaps of drying vegetation tiny hay- 

 stacks were the gathered material of their win- 

 ter stores. 



They do not, like the whistlers, pass the win- 

 ter in torpid sleep, nor is it possible for them 

 cither to seek or find any forage during the 

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