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234 the paths made by the musk-rats when the water was high in the winter leading from the river up the bank to a bed of grass above or below the surface. When it runs under the surface I frequently slump into it, and can trace it to the bed by the hollow sound when I stamp on the frozen ground. They have disfigured the banks very much in some places the past winter. Clams have been carried into these galleries a rod or more under the earth. When the ice still remained thick over the galleries, after the water had gone down, they kept on the surface and terminated, perhaps, at some stump where the earth was a little raised.

March 26, 1856. The Romans introduced husbandry into England where but little was practiced before, and the English have introduced it into America. So we may well read the Roman authors for a history of this art as practiced by us.

I am sometimes affected by the consideration that a man may spend the whole of his life after boyhood in accomplishing a particular design, as if he were put to a special and petty use, without taking time to look around him and appreciate the phenomenon of his existence. If so many purposes are thus necessarily left unaccomplished, perhaps un thought of, we are reminded of the transient interest we have in this