unlike their eastern relative, the woodchuck, little time do they waste 

 sleeping away in their holes, but are up bright and early, hurrying 

 away to their favorite feeding places, transacting the apparently 

 intensely important business of the town, paying short sociable calls 

 on their neighbors and when tired of all this bustling to and fro 

 coming back to rest on the mounds before their own doors, but still 

 keeping a watchful eye on the doings of their small world. 



These curious funnel-shaped mounds, about a foot high and 

 three or four feet in diameter at the base, are really the entrances to 

 their underground homes. He much dislikes water, being one of the 

 few creatures able to exist without drinking, and so carefully presses 

 the earth dug out by his excavations into this shape with the open- 

 ing to the passage beneath, in the center, that no rain may enter his 

 dwelling. 



The burrow itself slopes downward at an angle of forty-five 

 degrees for twelve or fifteen feet, then there is the horizontal 



200 



