Mice

Hotelkeepers do not admire mice.

They give their chambermaids severe instructions. Nevertheless, other Manhattan hotels were envious when, last week, mice were reported in the Waldorf-Astoria. For one thing, these mice were dead. For another, they were, as mice go, famed. They had arrived in the luggage of Explorer-Engineer Grant Carveth Wells of England, who was going to take them to the American Museum of Natural History, where they would be mounted against a background of bleak tundra and labeled Lemmus norvegicus, the lemming. Stubby of tail, tawny of fur, blunt of snout, five inches long, lemmings are probably the only mice that ever excited awe in both sexes of human kind. Not Aesop's mouse who gnawed a lion free; not the three blind mice whom the farmer's spouse decaudated; not the clock-scaling mouse of Mother Goose nor Alice's dormouse nor the mouse that did not stir the night before Christmas nor even Ignatz Mouse* himself, have histories to compare with the lemmings', who date back to Norse mythology and further; back to Miocene days when lemmings periodically migrated from the Scandinavian peninsula to another continent, perhaps lost Atlantis, by land routes which no longer exist. The lemmings have not yet learned that their oldtime highways are gone. At uncertain intervals (sometimes after five years, sometimes after 20) they mass on an edge of the Scandinavian plateau/- and start a beeline migration. They move by the million, having families more plentifully than ever on the march; destroying crops and herbage; preyed on by throngs of bigger beasts. They never hesitate,moving on (like Theodore Roosevelt and his children**) over every obstacle, lake, river, mountain, until they reach the sea. Here their blind instinct persists and out they swim, still in the line of the migration, until the last one is drowned. Only a few will have stayed behind, hibernating or lacking true lemming instinct, or perhaps so hardy that they have not felt the need for a more congenial home. These will be progenitors of new millions.

*Most popular U. S. comic strip character, widely syndicated creation of Cartoonist George Herriman. At his partner-in-comedy, Krazy Kat, he throws hundreds of black ink bricks annually, his aim being uncanny accuracy. As a brick hits Krazy Kat, Ignatz often cries, "Phooey."

/-Or the Arctic plain in north Asia or America. Author Earl Rossman of Black Sunlight (1926) mentions that the last migration of the Alaskan lemmings (Lemmus migripen) occurred in 1888.

**A Sunday pastime of Roosevelt's was to set out for a tramp with the children following one line as far as possible, to some unscalable wall or impassable river. The design: to have an exciting time, to teach tenacity of purpose.