CHAPTER XXV 

 MOLES AND MOLE-SKINS 



THE increasing taste for furs in ladies' dress has 

 brought mole-skin into fashion once more ; and for 

 a time it was so popular, and garments made of it 

 were so expensive, that the skins of rabbits, squirrels, 

 musk-rats, and any other animals whose fur could 

 be treated and made to resemble the moles' were 

 more than doubled in value. Except the practically 

 extinct marten, the mole has the finest fur of any 

 English animal ; but the " little gentleman in black 

 velvet," who was toasted by the Jacobites because 

 William of Orange broke his collar-bone in a fall 

 caused by a mole-hill at Hampton Court, had been 

 almost forgotten by town dwellers until the recent 

 change of fashion brought him so much into request. 

 Hundreds of thousands of mole-skins must have been 

 used in the first few years of this century, yet the 

 little miners of our meadows do not seem to have 

 decreased to any appreciable extent. 



Mole's fur is not only beautifully fine and soft, 

 but it is set on perpendicularly like moss without any 

 inclination backwards. Its softness and the absence 

 of friction thus aid the moles to pass through their 

 burrows either backwards or forwards. The regula- 



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