Winter Sleep
On a perfect summer-like day of autumn, it is strange to think that hedgehogs are going to their winter quarters, and that sleep is overtaking so many creatures—bats that hang amid the dark rafters of the barn roofs; toads in the mud of the ponds; field-mice, water-voles, lizards, badgers, squirrels, hedgehogs curled in the ditches, snugly rolled up in a great ball of dry grass and leaves; and the dormouse, "seven sleeper," as it is called locally, or "dorymouse," "sleeper," or "sleeping-mouse." Much country weather-lore, in all parts of the world, is based on the storing of nuts by squirrels, the building of winter houses by musk-rats, the early or late cutting of winter supplies of wood by beavers, the working of moles, who are supposed before winter comes to prepare basins for the storage of worms, and the laying up of food on the part of bears. "The hedgehog," said the writer of "Husbandman's Practice," "commonly hath two holes or vents in his den or cave, the one toward the south and the other toward the north, and look which of them he stops; thence will come great storms and winds follow." The badger in his winter retreat certainly will block up holes from which draughts blow.
