“But how could he?” protested the Child reproachfully.  He was always troubled when Uncle Andy displayed anything like a frivolous strain.

“To be sure!  To be sure!  You couldn’t have expected that of Bill,” agreed Uncle Andy.  “Still, you know, the opinion of the prairie dogs would have been interesting, wouldn’t it?  Well, I’ll tell you a story just as soon as I can get this old pipe to draw properly, and then you can judge the opinion of the prairie dogs as to whether the Little Burrowing Owl is ‘good’ or not.  If their opinion does not agree with Bill’s, why you can choose for yourself between the two.”

“Prairie Dog Village was of considerable size, covering as it did perhaps a dozen acres of the dry, light prairie soil.  Its houses were crowded together without any regard to order or arrangement, and so closely as to suggest that their owners imagined land was scarce in the neighborhood.  It wasn’t.  For hundreds of miles in every direction the plains stretched away to the dim horizon.  There was room everywhere, nothing much, in fact, but room, with a little coarse grass and plenty of clear air.  But the population went in for crowding by preference, and didn’t care a cactus whether it was hygienic or not.

“The houses were ail underground, each with a rounded hillock of earth beside its front door; and the size of these hillocks was an indication of the size of the houses beneath, for they were all formed by the earth brought to the surface in the process of excavating the rooms and passages.  On the tops of these hillocks the owners sat up in the sun to bark and chatter and gossip with their nearest neighbors, always ready to dive headlong down their front doors, with a twinkling of their hind feet, at the approach of danger,

“But if the village was large, the Little Villager himself was decidedly small.  Some twelve or fifteen inches in length from the tip of his innocent-looking nose to the end of his short and quite undistinguished-looking tail, he seldom had occasion to stretch himself out to his full length, and therefore he seldom got the credit of such inches as he actually possessed.  His ears were short and rounded, his eyes were large, softly bright, and as innocent-looking as his nose.  His body was plump and rounded, and he looked almost as much a baby when quite grown up as he had looked when he was still a responsibility to his talkative little mother.  In color he was of a grayish-brown on top, and of a dingy white underneath, with a black tip to his tail to give a finish which his costume would otherwise have lacked.