imbs to the top of
it and looks in my direction. As I move as if to get up, he drops
back quietly to his hole.

A chipmunk comes along on the stone wall, hurrying somewhere on
an important errand, but changing his course every moment. He
runs on the top of the wall, then along its side, then into it
and through it and out on the other side, pausing every few
seconds and looking and listening, careful not to expose himself
long in any one position, really skulking and hiding all along
his journey. His enemies are keen and watchful and likely to
appear at any moment, and he knows it, not so much by experience
as by instinct. His young are timid and watchful the first time
they emerge from the den into the light of day.

Then a red squirrel comes spinning along. By jerks and nervous,
spasmodic spurts he rushes along from cover to cover like a
soldier dodging the enemy's bullets. When he discovers me, he
pauses, and with one paw on his heart appears to press a button,
that lets off a flood of snickering, explosive sounds that seem
like ridicule of me and my work. Failing to get any response from
me, he presently turns, and, springing from the wall to the
bending branch of a near apple-tree, he rushes up and disappears
amid the foliage. Presently I see him on the end of a branch,
where he seizes a green apple not yet a third grown, and, darting
down to a large horizontal branch, sits up with the apple in his
paws and proceeds to chip it up for the pale, unripe seeds at its
core, all the time keenly alive to possible dangers that may
surround him. What a nervous, hustling, highstrung creature he
is--a live wire at all times and places! That pert curl of the
end of his tail, as he sits chipping the apple or cutting through
the shell of a nut, is expressive of his character. What a
contrast his nervous and explosive activity presents to the more
sedate and dignified life of the gray squirrel! One of these
passed us only a few yards away on our walk in the woods the
other day--a long, undulating line of soft gray, silent as a
spirit and graceful as a wave on the beach.

A little later, in the fine, slow-falling rain, a rabbit suddenly
emerges into my field of vision fifty feet away. How timid and
scared she looks! She pauses a moment amid the weeds, then hops
a yard or two and pauses again, then passes under the bars
and hesitates on the edge of a more open and exposed place
immediately in front of me. Here she works her n