ikes it better. I
doubt if Charles Dickens ever saw the animal, but when he created
Mr. Wardle's fat boy he might well have taken him for a model.
"D--n that boy," says Mr. Wardle, "he's asleep again." That was when
he had ceased eating, and so it is with the woodchuck. In the
early dawn when the dew is on the lettuce, he takes his toll of
the bed, seasoning it with a radish and a snip at a leaf or two
from the herb bed. But such are mere appetizers for the feast. The
next course is the peas. He can go down a row of peas that are
about to set their flat pods swelling to become fat pods and
eliminate everything but a stubble of tough butts that have been
shorn of their ladylike and smiling greenness. Pea vines in the
garden always seem such gentle ladies, clad in a fabric of soft,
semitransparent green, nodding and smiling, slender, tall and
sweet. But when the woodchuck romps back up the row nothing is to
be seen but the smile.

They returned from the ride
With the lady inside,
And the smile on the face of the tiger.

I once heard a vigorous discussion amongst men who know the woods
and the ways of wild creatures, as to whether or not a woodchuck
can climb a tree. The discussion ended rather abruptly when one of
the party produced a photograph of a woodchuck a dozen feet up a
big pine sitting on a small stub of a limb, looking somewhat
exultant but also as if he wondered not only how he got so high
but how on earth he was ever to get down again. I myself would not
have believed a woodchuck could climb a tree of that size if I had
not seen the photograph, and I fear there are some doubters in the
party to this day. But whether or not a woodchuck can climb a big
pine he can go up a bean pole as far as a bean vine can climb, and
return with the bean vine inside. It takes but a few mornings for
a woodchuck who means to keep fat enough not to shame his tribe to
send a fleet of beans, that but now had everything set in living
green from main truck to keelson, scudding down the garden under
bare poles, a melancholy sight to the amateur truck farm
navigator. On peas and beans the woodchuck holds his own, and he
reckons as his own all that the garden contains. For all that you
find frequently one that has a special taste. My last year's most
intimate woodchuck climbed the bean poles and romped the rows of
early peas as I have described. These were his occupation, his
day's work, so to speak, and he went at them at the