But what a fuss these human factories make! Why, in growing-time, out in the clover field, where the loudest sound you hear is the drone of the bumblebee among the blossoms, the little bacteria people down among the roots are making nitrogen so much cheaper than the big noisy factories that it only costs the farmer about one-fifth as much as the storm-barrel nitrogen. And yet, of course, it often pays to buy the artificial nitrogen, too. There are many more striking things about the habits of roots than I have had room to tell about here, which you will find in such books as Elliot's "Romance of Plant Life," Coulter's "Plant Studies," Coulter's "First Book of Botany," Allen's "Story of the Plants," Chase's "Buds, Stems and Roots," Atkinson's "First Studies of Plant Life," Darwin's "Power of Movement in Plants," France's "Germs of Mind in Plants," Gray's "How Plants Behave," Carpenter's "Vegetable Physiology," Detmer's "Plant Physiology," and Parsons's "Plants and Their Children." [Illustration: THANKSGIVING DINNER OF THE DORMICE They don't sit at the dinner table like that, to be sure, but along in the Fall and up to nearly the time of our Thanksgiving dinners, the dormice eat unusually heavy meals and put fat on their little bones to help them through the long, cold, and barren months of winter.] CHAPTER XI (NOVEMBER) All-cheering plenty, with her flowing horn Led yellow Autumn, wreathed with nodding corn. --_Burns: "Brigs of Ayr."_ There's silence in the harvest field, And blackness in the mountain glen, And clouds that will not pass away From the hill tops for many a day; And stillness round the homes of men. --_Mary Howitt: "Winter."_ THE AUTUMN STORES AND THE LONG WINTER NIGHT When the caveman was still living from hand to mouth; before he had even got as far as his first crooked stick for a plough, and when Mrs. Cave couldn't have canned a bean or a berry to save her life, even if she had had the cans, a certain little farmer already knew how to get root crops in the Fall and clean them and cut them and put them away in his little barn under the ground for Winter use. Several of these forehanded folk we have already met--the beaver and the chipmunk, among others--but since we are now at the end of the harvest year I thought we might spend this evening--the last but one, I am sorry to say, that we shall be together--in a little chat about these thrifty brothers of the wild, and how some of them are going to spend the long Winter that begins in the Autumn and lasts until Spring. I. LITTLE GRANARIES UNDER THE GROUND I was going to begin by saying that one of the most _fore_-handed of them all has _six_ feet, but as that would be almost as bad as a pun, I decided not to. You would have known, of course, that by people with six feet I meant the insects. ANTS THAT THRESH AND STORE