Indian summer. Balzac's comparison to ripe womanhood. The significant worn walk round the mean man's field; its crooked outline impressively striking. All in all, a white day. Memory of it supplies these notes. They might be expanded into an essay. The country, the country! Though the man who would truly relish and enjoy it must be previously furnished with a large and various stock of ideas, which he must be capable of turning over in his own mind, of comparing, varying, and contemplating upon with pleasure; he must so thoroughly have seen the world as to cure him of being over fond of it; and he must have so much good sense and virtue in his own heart as to prevent him from being disgusted with his own reflections, or uneasy in his own company. Alas! Footnote: [A] By permission. [Illustration: GOPHER. 5/6 Life-size. FROM COL. F. KAEMPFER. A. W. MUMFORD, PUBLISHER, CHICAGO. COPYRIGHT 1900, BY NATURE STUDY PUB. CO., CHICAGO.] THE GOPHER. The name of gopher, according to Brehm, is applied in some American localities to various other widely variant rodents. The zoölogists, who first described the animal, obtained their specimens from Indians, who had amused themselves by cramming both cheek pouches full of earth, distending them to such a degree that if the animal had walked the pouches would have trailed on the earth. These artificially distended pouches obtained for the gopher its name; the taxidermists who prepared the dead specimens endeavored to give them what was supposed to be a life-like appearance by following the practice of the Indians in distending the cheek pouches, and the artists who delineated the animal followed the models which were accessible to them, but too truly in their drawings. Owing to these circumstances, the pictures of gophers of even recent date represent really monstrous animals, when they honestly intend to familiarize us with the gopher.