But, speaking of coats, I want to introduce you to a still more rapid worker in the soil, who wears a coat of mail. He is called the armadillo. There used to be a species of armadillo in western Texas. Whether there are any there still I don't know,[19] but go on down to South America and you'll find all you want. The woods are full of them, and so are those vast prairies--the pampas. The plates in the armadillo's coat of mail are not made of steel, of course, but of bone. These bony plates are each separate from the other on most of his body but made into solid bucklers over the shoulders and the hips. The armadillos have very short, stout legs and very long, strong claws, and how they can dig! They can dig fast in any kind of soil, but in the loose soil of the pampas they dig so fast that if you happen to catch sight of one when out riding and he sees _you_, you'll have to start toward him with your horse on the run if you want to see anything more of him. Before you can get to him and throw yourself from the saddle, he'll have buried himself in the ground. And you can't catch him; not even if you have a spade and dig away with all your might. He'll dig ahead of you, faster--a good deal faster--than you can follow. [19] One of my friends in the faculty of the University of Chicago tells me there are still a good many armadillos in Texas. MR. ARMADILLO'S REMARKABLE NOSE DRILL For all he looks so knightly, so far as his armor is concerned, the armadillo is timid, peaceful, and never looking for trouble with anybody, but once aroused fights fiercely and does much damage with his long hooked claws. His chief diet is ants. These he finds with his nose. He locates them by scent and then bores in after them. You'd think he'd twist it off, that long nose of his; he turns it first one way and then the other, like a gimlet. And so fast! The armadillo dislikes snakes as much as all true knights disliked dragons. That is, he doesn't like them socially; although he's quite fond of them as a variation in diet. He'll leap on a snake, paying not the slightest attention to his attempts to bite through that coat of mail, and tear him into bits and eat him. Another armored knight that eats snakes and that other animals seldom eat--much as they'd like to--is the hedgehog. If you were a fox, instead of a boy or girl, I wouldn't have to tell you about how hard it is to serve hedgehog at the family table. One of the earliest things a little fox learns in countries where there are hedgehogs is to let the hedgehog alone. "Hedgehogs would be very nice--to eat, I mean--if they weren't so ugly about not wanting to be eaten." We can imagine Mamma Fox saying that to the children. Then she goes on: