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.
"Except for unimportant variations in size, there was perhaps some hundreds of thousands of others, just like the Little Villager, sitting on their hillocks, or popping in and out of their round doorways, and chattering and barking in shrill chorus under the pale blue dome of a lovely sky.