“Now as to the mole, what does it eat? The best way to decide the question of an animal’s diet is to examine the contents of its stomach. Let us, then, open the mole’s stomach and see for ourselves. Sometimes it is found to contain red fragments of the common earth-worm; sometimes a hash of beetles, recognizable from the tough remains that have resisted digestion, such as bits of claws and wing-sheaths; sometimes, again, and oftener than not, a marmalade of larvæ, especially those of the June-bug, with their distinctive signs like the mandibles and the hard casing of the head. One finds, in short, a little of every sort of game haunting the soil,—polypods and millepeds, insects and caterpillars, moths in the chrysalis, underground worms and nymphs, and so on; but the minutest scrutiny fails to discover a single particle of vegetable matter. “The mole, then, is exclusively carnivorous, and furthermore it has a monstrous appetite, a perfectly insatiable stomach that in twelve hours demands a quantity of food equal to the animal’s weight. The mole’s existence is one gluttonous frenzy, ever renewing itself, never appeased; a few hours’ abstinence suffices to kill the creature. To still the anguish of that stomach, which is no sooner stuffed with food than it is emptied again, what can the animal count upon? On the grubs living in the ground, and especially on those of the June-bug, tender and fat. It is a small creature for supplying the wants of such an appetite, but its numbers make up for its littleness. What a massacre of worms, then, must not the mole be credited with in the season when worms abound! Scarcely is one meal finished before another begins, and at each repast the worms must be gobbled up by the dozen. To clear a field of these formidable ravagers the farmer has no helper equal to the mole. The only regret is that to reach the vermin on which the animal lives, it has to burrow among the roots where they have their haunts. Many roots that lie in the way are necessarily ruptured in this work; plants are broken off and destroyed; and, finally, the little piles of earth, or mole-hills, heaped up by the animal in the course of its excavations, impede the reaper when harvest-time comes around. Never mind: the worms would have caused much more serious damage, and to get rid of them there is nothing like this ravenous insect-hunter. Therefore, children, never molest the mole, the protector of our crops.