Of course, we always expect the ants to do extraordinary things, but one of those four-legged farmers I mentioned in the beginning of the chapter anticipated the principle of the very latest type of threshing-machine. It's a fact. This remarkable little animal threshing-machine is called the hamster. He is found in Europe east of the Rhine and in certain portions of Asia. He does both his cutting and threshing in his field; something the Gauls did in the days of the Romans in a crude way, but which men of our day have only got to doing in recent years. He pulls down the wheat ear, cuts it off between his teeth, and then threshes it by drawing the heads through his mouth. The grain falls right into sacks as fast as it is threshed; just as it does in those huge, combined reapers and threshers that you see on our big wheat farms. Mr. Hamster's sacks are his cheek-pouches, one on each side. When these are filled, this little threshing-machine turns itself into an auto, a commercial truck, and off it goes with its load of wheat to the little barn hidden in the ground. These cheek-pouches, by the way, reach from the hamster's cheeks clear back to his shoulders, and both of these pouches will together hold something like a thousand grains of wheat. He empties them by holding his paws tight against the side of his face and then pushing forward. Rather a clever unloading device, too; don't you think so? Just as good for Mr. Hamster's purposes as the endless-chain system at the Buffalo grain elevator that Mr. Kipling admired so much. And in the mere matter of the amount of grain handled, the work of the hamster is not to be laughed at. The peasant farmers are very glad to find a hamster granary, which, of course, they promptly take possession of by due process of law: "The good old rule, the simple plan That they shall take who have the power, And they shall hold who can." One of Mr. Hamster's neighbors, the field-rat of Hungary and Asia, stores his grain right in the house--the place where he lives with his family. Mr. Hamster, however, has his barns separate from his home. Sometimes he has one, sometimes two; and the older members of the community may have four or five. II. MR. VOLE AND HIS ROOT CELLAR The farmer I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, who is so thrifty about his root crops and so neat, belongs to the Vole family. He lives away over in Siberia and his full name is _Arvicola economus_. In gathering his crop of roots, he first digs a little trench around them and lays them bare. Then he cleans them off nicely so as not to fill his storehouse with dirt; cuts them up in sizes convenient for carrying, and then hauls them home and piles them up in little cellars made specially for them.