end the dog won, but
he was the most devastated small dog that I have ever seen, before
or since, and had it not been for prompt surgical aid at his home
nearby I dare say Charon might have ferried both shades over the
Styx together. No, the woodchuck is not so easy to get. He is
quite likely to whip his own weight in most anything that forces
him to do battle.

But I have never known a woodchuck to do battle that was not
forced upon him. In point of fact he is one of the most
home-loving, peaceful animals I have known. He is the original
home-body and if the market where he is forced to seek supplies is
not near enough to his home he moves the home nearer the market. In
that often lies his undoing. His safety is in the woodland border
or in the far pasture stone wall. There if he would content
himself with aromatic barks and wild pasture herbs he might dwell
unharmed of man, who is his chief enemy. But he loves the clover
field, and often his first move toward disaster is coming up from
the pasture wall and digging a burrow in the midst of the clover
where he soon has regular paths which take him from one rich clump
to another. After that he sniffs the kitchen garden, and the
descent to Avernus is easy. He moves in to the borders, finds a
crevice or digs a hole, and revels. Nor does he recognize the
place as Avernus--which it is bound to be sooner or later--but
spells it Olympus in very truth. Man may be the devastator of the
earth, and he certainly is so far as its wild life is concerned,
but as a producer of succulence in the kitchen garden he is a
deity before whom any woodchuck must fall down and worship.

For the woodchuck besides being the original home-body is without
doubt one of the founders of vegetarianism. Born in the desert
places, feeding on locust bark and wild honeysuckle, he added
inches to his girth when he learned that red clover which the
early settlers kindly brought with them had a nourishing quality
that defies competition. A woodchuck can get so fat on clover that
by November, when he retires for the year, he is as near a
complete globe as anything with feet and a face can ever be. The
convexity begins at his eyebrows above, at his chin beneath, and
though he has feet, they have the effect of being merely pinned on
to the lower hem of his garment, as those of a proper young lady
in our grandmother's day were supposed to be. The woodchuck can
get no fatter than that on garden truck, but he l