FARMERS WITH FOUR FEET
Before we start this chapter—it's going to be about the farmers with four feet, you see—I want to say something, and that's this: Don't let anybody tell you moles eat roots. They don't! They eat the cutworms that do eat the roots. Haven't I been in mole runs often enough to know! Of course, the moles do cut a root here and there occasionally when it happens to be in the way, as they tunnel along, but what does that amount to?
Why, in France they put Mr. Mole in vineyards—on purpose! He's one of the regular hands about the place, just like the hired man.
[I. Mr. Mole and His Relations]
Moles do a lot of good work for the farmer. Not only were they ploughing and ploughing and ploughing the soil—over and over again—thousands of centuries before man came along to plant seed in it, but they are all the time eating, among other things, destructive worms and insects in the soil. They work all over the world, that is to say, in the upper half of it—the Northern Hemisphere; and there's where the biggest half of the land is, if I haven't forgotten my geography.
WONDERFUL LITTLE MACHINES ON FOUR LEGS
Closely related to the moles are the shrews—quaint little mouse-like creatures with long, pointed heads and noses that they can twist about almost any way in hunting their meals and finding out other things in this big world that concern them. On these funny, long noses they have whiskers like a pussy-cat; and that helps, too, when you want to keep posted on what's going on around you. Like the moles the shrews are found all over the Northern Hemisphere. What is known as the "long-tailed shrew," is the very smallest of our relations among the mammalia. Why, they're no bigger than the end of a man's little finger; and the smallest watch I ever heard of was a good deal bigger than that. Yet, inside these wee bodies is as much machinery as it takes to run any other mammal—an elephant, say.
THE COMMON AND THE SHORT-TAILED SHREW