lift him from his cozy
bed in the midst of his brothers and sisters and give him a sharp pinch
on the neck with her teeth to make him start.

The pocket was reached by a tunnel that had been well begun and then
abandoned by an industrious but timid pocket-gopher. This timidity and
industry had been taken advantage of when the badgers began their
colonization of the wheat-field, and the pocket and a second tunnel
completed; so that the result was a comfortable residence and, finally,
an ideal nursery. But in all probability he and his brothers and sisters
did not realize how cozily Providence had placed them until that
dreadful day.

It was when they were having their regular romp with their mother that
the first indication of trouble came. His father, who had been sitting
at the mouth of the tunnel gossiping with a neighboring fox, rushed down
wildly to the little family, and fairly fell over them in an effort to
escape by the second tunnel beyond. The fierce barking of the dogs was
heard. Then the great flood of water swept down upon them from both
tunnels, lifting them all in a struggling, suffocating mass to the top
of the pocket.

His mother, the instinct of self-preservation overcoming her parental
love, started madly for a tunnel, and, in swimming against the floating
ruins of her nest, pushed him before her up the opening and into the
full light of day. There, blinded by the sunlight and exhausted, he lost
consciousness, and lay unnoticed, partly hidden beneath the feathers and
grass that had made his bed, until the little girl saw him.

* * * * *

HE rewarded her for his first meal by turning on his back with his legs
in the air and grunting contentedly. He was of a grizzled gray color,
soft, fat, clumsy, short of limb and thick of tail, and displayed, in
spite of his few weeks, a remarkably fine set of claws on his fore feet.
These he alternately thrust out and drew in, as she petted him, and
curled up his long, black-and-white nose. The little girl thought him
the nicest pet she had ever had, and soon fell a willing slave to his
wheedling grunts.

He was christened "Badgy," and spent the first month of his new life in
a warmly padded soap-box in the farm-house kitchen. But by the end of
that time he had outgrown the box, and, the weather being warmer, was
given the empty potato-bin in the cellar. When he was big enough to run
about, he spent his days out of doors. Early in