At Home with Wild Nature 



If this little animal were rare and only found in some 

 remote corner of the earth it would be considered a 

 marvellous quadruped. A whole book, and a very 

 interesting one too, could be written upon it and its 

 wonderful ways. 



To begin with, it wears upon its back the toughest 

 and thickest skin for its size of any fur-bearing mammal 

 in the world, and cannot, like many other quadrupeds, 

 and bipeds too for that matter, be rubbed the wrong 

 way. If stroked from head to tail it is all right, and 

 equally so if in the opposite direction, because it is 

 sometimes compelled to run backwards as well as for- 

 wards in its dark tunnels, and its fur has been so in- 

 geniously adapted by Nature that it will lie smoothly in 

 either direction. 



It possesses an enormous appetite and is compelled 

 to work hard to satisfy it. It has been asserted that a 

 mole can consume its own weight of worms in a day 

 and that it cannot live more than twenty-four hours 

 without nourishment. I am bound to confess from a 

 goodly experience gained by the keeping of many 

 specimens in captivity, that both assertions appear to 

 have some truth in them. Some years ago I kept a 

 mole in an old iron luggage trunk, the bottom of which 

 was covered with such a thin layer of mould that the 

 animal could not get under it, and I could in conse- 

 quence observe all its actions with ease and certainty. 

 In these circumstances the creature became so tame 

 and confiding that it would feed out of my hand. It 

 possessed such a voracious appetite that the idea 



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