n tufts of low trees which
spring up in dampish places where the spring fires have less sweep. The
hillocks are well drained, as appears from their composition of clear
gravel, a material of which you will find more in one of them than on a
surface of many feet around; and you may see the sweeter grasses
gradually mantling them, these being followed by herbage of larger
growth, which, accumulating humors at their roots, bourgeon into
arborescence, until, one vegetable entity shouldered into substance and
thrift by another, the nucleus built by our tiny red friends has
broadened into a tree-clad knoll. The mezquit, not many years ago
confined for the most part to the arid region beyond the Nueces, is
spreading eastward, and the clumps of it which begin to skirt the
original copses here may be supposed to owe their first foothold to the
ant. This humble promoter of forestry is duly appreciated, if only as a
viand, by his neighbors. Full-grown, and still more in the larval stage,
he is esteemed by them as both a toothsome and a beaksome bit. He--or,
more numerously, she, if we insist on sex and decline the more
practically correct _it_--forms thus the lowest term in an ascending
series of animal life that grows out of the ant-hill like the tree. So
much may one such settlement in a rood of ground do for the maintenance
of organic existence.

A still more diffused, perhaps, if less productive, source of life
exists in another burrower and mound-builder, the crawfish. Unlike the
ant, which likes to drain, he is an advocate of irrigation. In this art
he can give our well-diggers odds in the game. His genius for striking
water is wonderful. On the dryest parts of the prairie, miles from any
permanent stream, his ejections of mud may be found. Shallow or deep,
his borings always reach water. He is always at home, but less
accessible to callers than the ant. To the smaller birds he is forbidden
fruit. In wet weather, when his vestibule is shallow, the sand-hill
crane may burglarize him, or even get a snap judgment on him at the
front door. The bill of the great curlew cannot be sent in so
effectively, not being so rightly drawn; but that bird, more common in
the season than anywhere else away from the coast, finds plenty of other
food. He is not here in the winter. His place just now is filled by the
jacksnipe, which flutters up from every boggy place and comes to bag in
a condition anything but suggestive of short commons. The