uild winter houses under the great drifts.
They found little mouse colonies in places where they have never been in
summer. The conditions of life with them are entirely changed. They can
get at the roots of the grasses, or the various herbs and seeds they
feed upon, as well as in the snowless seasons, and without exposure to
their enemies.

I fancy they have great times there beneath the drifts. Maybe they have
their picnics and holidays then as we have ours in summer. When the
drifts disappear in spring, you may often see where they have had their
little encampments: a few square yards of the pasture or meadow bottom
will look as if a map had been traced upon it; tunnels and highways
running and winding in every direction and connecting the nests of dry
grass, which might stand for the cities and towns on the map. These
runways are smooth and round like pipes, and only a little larger than
the bodies of the mice. I think it is only the meadow field-mouse that
lives in this way beneath the snow.

I met one of these mice in my travels one day under peculiar conditions.
He was on his travels also, and we met in the middle of a mountain lake.
I was casting my fly there, when I saw, just sketched or etched upon the
glassy surface, a delicate V-shaped figure, the point of which reached
about to the middle of the lake, while the two sides, as they diverged,
faded out toward the shore. I saw the point of this V was being slowly
pushed across the lake. I drew near in my boat, and beheld a little
mouse swimming vigorously for the opposite shore. His little legs
appeared like swiftly revolving wheels beneath him. As I came near, he
dived under the water to escape me, but came up again like a cork and
just as quickly. It was laughable to see him repeatedly duck beneath the
surface and pop back again in a twinkling. He could not keep under water
more than a second or two. Presently I reached him my oar, when he ran
up it and into the palm of my hand, where he sat for some time and
arranged his fur and warmed himself. He did not show the slightest fear.
It was probably the first time he had ever shaken hands with a human
being. He had doubtless lived all his life in the woods, and was
strangely unsophisticated. How his little round eyes did shine, and how
he sniffed me to find out if I was more dangerous than I appeared to his
sight!

After a while I put him down in the bottom of the boat and resumed my
fishing. But it was not l