The scenery is romantic and beautiful beyond description. Towering up into the very clouds, as a background, are the mighty hills of the Cascade range, their misty summits capped with perpetual snow—their craggy sides rent into chasms and ravines, whose depths and solitudes no man’s foot has ever trodden, and clad up to the very snow-line with mighty pine and cedar-trees. The Chilukweyuk river already referred to washes one side of the prairie. Silvery-green and ever-trembling cottonwood trees, ruddy black-birch, and hawthorn, like a girdle, encircle the prairie, and form a border, of Nature’s own weaving, to the brilliant carpet of emerald grass, patterned with wild flowers of every hue and tint,—all shading pleasantly away, and losing their brilliancy in the dark green pine-trees. In the sandy banks on the edge of the Chilukweyuk river, and the various little streams winding through the prairie-grass, lives the Urotrichus. His mansion is a large hole, lined with bits of grass, and this hole is his sleeping-room and drawing-room. A genuine bachelor, he never dines at home. He has lots of roads tunnelled away from his central mansion, radiating from it like the spokes of a wheel. His tunnels are not at all like those of the mole; he never throws up mounds or heaps of earth, in order to get rid of the surplus material he digs out, as the mole does, but makes open cuttings at short intervals, about four or five inches long; and now we shall see the use of those curiously-formed scraper-like hind-feet. As he digs out the tunnel with his trowel-hands, he throws back the earth towards his hind-feet; these, from their peculiar shape, enable him to back this dirt out of the hole, using them like two scrapers—only that he pushes the dirt away, instead of pulling it towards himself. Having backed the dirt clear of the mouth of the hole, he throws it out over the edge of the open cutting; after having dug in some distance—and finding, I daresay, the labour of backing-out rather irksome—he digs up through the ground to the surface, makes another open cutting, and then begins a new hole or tunnel, and disappears into the earth again. When he has gone as far from his dormitory as he deems wise, he again digs through, and clears away the rubbish. This road is now complete, so he goes back again to his central mansion, to begin others at his leisure.