pulation went in for crowding by
preference, and didn't care a cactus whether it was hygienic or not.

"The houses were ail underground, each with a rounded hillock of earth
beside its front door; and the size of these hillocks was an indication
of the size of the houses beneath, for they were all formed by the
earth brought to the surface in the process of excavating the rooms and
passages. On the tops of these hillocks the owners sat up in the sun
to bark and chatter and gossip with their nearest neighbors, always
ready to dive headlong down their front doors, with a twinkling of
their hind feet, at the approach of danger,

"But if the village was large, the Little Villager himself was
decidedly small. Some twelve or fifteen inches in length from the tip
of his innocent-looking nose to the end of his short and quite
undistinguished-looking tail, he seldom had occasion to stretch himself
out to his full length, and therefore he seldom got the credit of such
inches as he actually possessed. His ears were short and rounded, his
eyes were large, softly bright, and as innocent-looking as his nose.
His body was plump and rounded, and he looked almost as much a baby
when quite grown up as he had looked when he was still a responsibility
to his talkative little mother. In color he was of a grayish-brown on
top, and of a dingy white underneath, with a black tip to his tail to
give a finish which his costume would otherwise have lacked.

"Except for unimportant variations in size, there was perhaps some
hundreds of thousands of others, just like the Little Villager, sitting
on their hillocks, or popping in and out of their round doorways, and
chattering and barking in shrill chorus under the pale blue dome of a
lovely sky. But on the hillock next door to the Little Villager sat no
garrulous, furry gossip like himself. That mound top was deserted.
But at its foot, curled up and basking in the still blaze of the sun,
close beside the doorway, lay a thick-bodied, dusty-colored rattler,
the intricate markings on his back dimmed as if by too much light and
heat. His venomous, triangular head, with the heavy jaw base that
showed great poison pockets, lay flat on his coils, and he had the
lazy, well-fed appearance of one who does not have to forage for his
meals. Here and there, scattered at wide intervals throughout the
village, were to be seen other rattlers, of all sizes, from foot-long
youngsters up to stout fellows over