You may capture these little fellows by hand, if you use due caution in approaching their habitation, and shield your hand with an ordinary pocket-handkerchief. They will make beautiful pets, and you will find them much more interesting than the common white mice. Give them a tall narrow cage, with plenty of head room, wire a branch containing a last summer’s bird’s-nest to the side of their cage for sleeping quarters, and feed the mice with bread, seed, and grain. Short-tailed Meadow-Rats frequent the salt meadows, where their grass-roofed paths may be found intersecting each other everywhere. After the blunt-headed little creatures have been discovered, by uncovering their runways, you may capture them with your hand, shielded by a cloth cap. Beware of their teeth, for they are savage biters and plucky fighters. Meadow-rats are not climbers. Put them in a flat cage with a good wide expanse of bottom covered with sod of growing grass, the roots of which they will eagerly devour. Feed them garden vegetables, when grass roots are not available. If you are an expert it is sometimes possible to catch chipmonks by hand. I never succeeded but once in capturing one in this manner. They will enter almost any ordinary sort of a trap, and can be best captured in that way. Set the trap near the hole known to be occupied by one of these scolding little rodents, and give your captives a roomy cage, with a dark corner for a nest. They make gentle and amusing pets. Feed them on acorns and nuts. Crack the hardest nuts for them. Jumping-mice, when discovered, are off like a flash, and are too swift of foot to be captured by hand--at least this has been my experience. They may sometimes be found under clods of an old ploughed field, in fence corners, or under loose brush and stones. Like the white-footed mice and flying-squirrels, they are nocturnal in their habits, and there may be thousands living all around you, and you will never suspect their presence until your cat brings one in from the field, or you find their half-devoured remains in the screech-owl’s nest in the old apple-tree. Jumping-mice have been known to make their nests in a beehive, and I know of one short-tailed meadow-rat which chose the same sort of sweet home. In winter the jumping-mouse becomes torpid and apparently dead, and you may lay him away in a box of cotton, where it will remain until the bursting bud and freshening grass announce the approach of spring. Then your little pet will wake up, and be as full of life as if it had only taken a noon nap. Although quite vicious, and dangerous to handle in their wild state, Woodchucks make very gentle and comical pets. One celebrated woodchuck-hunter had great success by using a stuffed woodchuck as a decoy. A very good substitute for a stuffed animal may be made of gray Canton flannel, stuffed with cotton.