LITTLE FOLKS THAT GNAW 205 



7 

 winter. The illustrator of this book can testify- 

 to the fact that the deer-mouse stores food, for once 

 his player-piano refused to emit the strains of a 

 Beethoven sonata, and upon investigation he dis- 

 covered that two deer-mice had come into the house 

 (which had been vacant for a few weeks), made a 

 nest inside the piano, using the bellows for material, 

 and had stored therein, also, a peck of hulled chest- 

 nuts. I have also found hulled chestnuts in an old 

 stump, with deer-mice tracks about. 



Were it not for the fact that these beautiful little 

 creatures are almost entirely nocturnal and so not 

 often seen by the average person, there would be 

 far less popular prejudice against the whole breed 

 of mice. They leap gracefully with their long hind 

 legs, their fur and color are beautiful, their big, 

 timid eyes irresistibly appealing, their big ears and 

 whiskers comic. If, in our winter walks in the 

 woods, we could see them frisking about in the 

 fairy forests of the weeds, or dancing in an open 

 glade, as their tracks show they dance at night, 

 like the rabbits, the poets would have celebrated 

 them, and their features would be familiar to all 

 Americans. But alas! our poets do not haunt the 

 frozen thickets of the forest when a midnight moon 

 is shining coldly down, and the beautiful little deer- 

 mice lack their laureate. 



The muskrat and the beaver, the aquatic rodents, 

 roughly correspond to the cottontail and the snow- 

 shoe rabbit, for the smaller, less attractive species 

 has proved temperamentally adaptable to civiliza- 

 tion, and builds his winter nests in the river swales 

 within a stone's-throw of our villages, while the 



