[Illustration:  COMBINED THERMOMETER, HYGROMETER, BAROMETER AND PYROMETER Invented by the author in his boyhood]

A bird going down a deep narrow hole in the ground like a ferret or a weasel seemed very strange, and I thought it would be a fine thing to run forward, clap my hand over the hole, and have the fun of imprisoning him and seeing what he would do when he tried to get out.  So I ran forward but stopped when I got within a dozen or fifteen yards of the hole, thinking it might perhaps be more interesting to wait and see what would naturally happen without my interference.  While I stood there looking and listening, I heard a great disturbance going on in the burrow, a mixed lot of keen squeaking, shrieking, distressful cries, telling that down in the dark something terrible was being done.  Then suddenly out popped a half-grown gopher, four and a half or five inches long, and, without stopping a single moment to choose a way of escape, ran screaming through the stubble straight away from its home, quickly followed by another and another, until some half-dozen were driven out, all of them crying and running in different directions as if at this dreadful time home, sweet home, was the most dangerous and least desirable of any place in the wide world.  Then out came the shrike, flew above the run-away gopher children, and, diving on them, killed them one after another with blows at the back of the skull.  He then seized one of them, dragged it to the top of a small clod so as to be able to get a start, and laboriously made out to fly with it about ten or fifteen yards, when he alighted to rest.  Then he dragged it to the top of another clod and flew with it about the same distance, repeating this hard work over and over again until he managed to get one of the gophers on to the top of a log fence.  How much he ate of his hard-won prey, or what he did with the others, I can’t tell, for by this time the sun was down and I had to hurry home to my chores.

VI

THE PLOUGHBOY

The Crops—­Doing Chores—­The Sights and Sounds of Winter—­Road-making—­The Spirit-rapping Craze—­Tuberculosis among the Settlers—­A Cruel Brother—­The Rights of the Indians—­Put to the Plough at the Age of Twelve—­In the Harvest-Field—­Over-Industry among the Settlers—­Running the Breaking-Plough—­Digging a Well—­Choke-Damp—­Lining Bees.

At first, wheat, corn, and potatoes were the principal crops we raised; wheat especially.  But in four or five years the soil was so exhausted that only five or six bushels an acre, even in the better fields, was obtained, although when first ploughed twenty and twenty-five bushels was about the ordinary yield.  More attention was then paid to corn, but without fertilizers the corn-crop also became very meagre.  At last it was discovered that English clover would grow on even the exhausted fields, and that when ploughed under and planted with corn, or even wheat, wonderful crops were raised.  This caused a complete change in farming methods; the farmers raised fertilizing clover, planted corn, and fed the crop to cattle and hogs.