e, but the acquaintance does not quite amount to
friendship. The prairie marmot takes a lot of trouble and builds a nice
burrow, and then the owl, who is only a slovenly sort of architect
himself, comes along and takes apartments. It has never been quite
settled whether or not the lodger and the landlord agree pleasantly
together, but in the absence of any positive evidence they may be given
credit for perfect amiability; because nobody has found traces of owl in
a dead marmot's interior, nor of marmot in an owl's. But the rattlesnake
is another thing. He waits till the residence has been made perfectly
comfortable, and then comes in himself; not in the friendly capacity of
a lodger, but as a sort of unholy writter--a scaly man-in-possession. He
eats the marmot's family and perhaps the marmot himself: curling himself
up comfortably in the best part of the drawing-room. The owl and his
belongings he leaves severely alone; but whether from a doubt as to the
legality of distraining upon the goods of a lodger, or from a certainty
as to the lodger's goods including claws and a beak, naturalists do not
say. Personally, I incline very much to the claw-and-beak theory, having
seen an owl kill a snake in a very neat and workmanlike manner; and,
indeed, the rattlesnake sometimes catches a Tartar even in the marmot.

[Illustration: WRITTER.]

[Illustration: IN POSSESSION.]

It isn't terror of the snake that makes him unpopular; the most harmless
snake never acquires the confidence of other creatures; and one
hesitates to carry it in his hat. This general repugnance is something
like backing a bill or paying a tailor--entirely a matter of form.
Nothing else has sympathy with the serpent's shape. When any other
animal barters away his legs he buys either fins or wings with them;
this is a generally-understood law, invariably respected. But the snake
goes in for extravagance in ribs and vertebrae; an eccentric, rakish, and
improper proceeding; part of an irregular and raffish life. Nothing can
carry within it affection, or even respect, for an animal whose tail
begins nowhere in particular, unless it is at the neck; even if any
creature may esteem it an animal at all that is but a tail with a mouth
and eyes at one end. Dignify the mouth and eyes into a head, and still
you have nothing wherewith to refute those who shall call the snake
tribe naught but heads and tails; a vulgar and raffish condition of
life, of pot-house and Tommy-D