Nor need they trouble their minds the winter through about provisions. Some curious skater or perhaps a would-be fur dealer has been along at one end of the bog and broken into a number of houses and scattered others all to bits. A long thaw enabled him to do this, else the winter had kept them so safe from vandals that only a heavy ax or pick would give entrance. Among the ruins that this human earthquake caused are fat roots of the yellow pond lily, the spatter dock, as long as my arm. It looks as if some of the houses were half built of these petrified reptiles broken in chunks, scaly looking remnants of a previous geological age. These are the muskrat’s bread, or perhaps we might better say his potatoes. Rough and forbidding as they look they are white and crisp inside, and though their taste is as flat and insipid as that of a raw potato to you and me the muskrat votes them delicious and satisfying. The bottom of the pond is stored with them and he has but to dive and dig, and he even buttresses his winter wigwams with them. If he wants something a little more spicy there are spots in the bog, now safe under water and ice but within easy reach of a submarine like himself, where grow the pungent roots of the calamus, the sweet flag, of which he is very fond and which, when dried and sugared, most humans like to nibble. Stored all along the shallows are his shell-fish, the fresh water mussels whose thin shells he can easily tear open and whose white flesh he finds exceedingly toothsome. These, too, are as available in winter as in summer. Indeed some of his houses are built in the autumn, not so much for winter homes as restaurants where he may dine in seclusion on these very mollusks. Quite a distance from the bog, over in a shallow part of the pond, is a bed of these mussels with a flat-topped rock near by rising above the surface. Here last fall the muskrats built a lodge, right on the rock, which they used for this purpose. The first skaters kicked this lodge to pieces. It was fairly crammed with the empty shells of many a rare feast, showing that here Mussascus had undoubtedly entertained his friends in true Bohemian style.