78 MAMMALS OF PENNSYLVANIA AND NEW JERSEY. 



from among the hemlock roots. Stealing about among these fallen logs and ' 

 beds of moss and fern, in a perfect labyrinth of passageways, are scores of his 

 fellows, playing the tag and hide and seek of life and death with friends and 

 enemies. These long-eared, great-eyed and bewhiskered fellows must share 

 as best they may, the same by-ways and tunnels that form the hunting grounds 

 of many another sort of hidden creature whose doings have so long been as 

 a sealed book to men. Stump-tailed wood mice with rusty backs {Evotomys) , 

 strong- scented shrews, some fat and blood-thirsty, some so slender there's 

 room for two to pass, a Brewer's mole or two and now and then a flash of 

 Zapus fleeting by. Life is indeed not lonely here, even in the quiet day- 

 time, but crowded, strenuous and only half suppressed. Ask the trout fisher- 

 man or the still hunter. They have some secrets yet unrevealed in books. 



Except in the company he keeps there is but little difference in color and 

 habits between the deer , mouse of the AUeghanian forests and his more 

 plebeian counterpart of the valleys. Indeed they both meet on common 

 ground along the lower edges of the Canadian zone, daring to venture a little 

 into each other's pecuhar domain, yet never, so far as is known, interbreed- 

 ing, but ever maintaining their specific characters. 



Deer mice are a wonderfully large family all over this North American 

 continent, having more species by far than any other genus of American 

 mammals, yet they all have kept within a very narrow range of variation in 

 size, color and habits. What I have said, therefore, of Miller's deer mouse 

 will apply largely to all of them. In a few words, they were in measure 

 to colonial Americans what the house mouse of the Old World now is to the 

 super-civilized citizens of the New World, only far more beautiful and enter- 

 taining. In the lumberman's camp and settler's cabin they supply the full 

 measure of man's need of a domestic mouse to steal his victuals, nibble his 

 papers, nest in his boots and dance high carnival in the sheltering eaves. 



A word as to that cloud-dweller which we next consider, the dusky, long- 

 tailed sprite of the balsam woods, on the foggy peaks of the Great Smoky 

 Mountains. Of all dark ways, his are the darkest among eastern deer mice. 

 In consequence, all we know of him is that his looks do not belie his call- 

 ing, and when we place him alongside his Adirondack ancestors, he looks as 

 smoky as his native mountains and, strange contradiction, about a third smaller- 

 bodied with a long, slender tail. Such, in an intermediate degree, is his half- 

 way brother of the hemlocks at Summit Mills, in Somerset Co., near the 

 Maryland state line. — Rhoads. "At Summit Mills, a region altogether higher 

 than Krings in Cambria Co., canadensis seemed to replace leucopus entirely, 

 and there I took them everywhere, in stone. walls along fields, in oak and 

 hemlock woods and one in a trap set on the mountain for cliff rats. Traps 

 set in low, damp ground for Evotomys also often caught them." — IngersoU. 

 Description of species. — {^Canadensis) tail equal to or longer than head 



