ome automatic adjustment between
his tail and his vocal machinery.

The tail of the gray squirrel shows to best advantage when he is
running over the ground in the woods--and a long, graceful,
undulating line of soft silver gray the creature makes! In my
part of the country the gray squirrel is more strictly a
wood-dweller than the red, and has the grace and elusiveness that
belong more especially to the sylvan creatures.

The red squirrel can play a tune and accompany himself.
Underneath his strident, nasal snicker you may hear a note in
another key, much finer and shriller. Or it is as if the volume
of sound was split up into two strains, one proceeding from his
throat and the other from his mouth.

If the red squirrels do not have an actual game of tag, they
have something so near it that I cannot tell the difference. Just
now I see one in hot pursuit of another on the stone wall; both
are apparently going at the top of their speed. They make a red
streak over the dark-gray stones. When the pursuer seems to
overtake the pursued and becomes "It," the race is reversed, and
away they go on the back track with the same fleetness of the
hunter and the hunted, till things are reversed again. I have
seen them engaged in the same game in tree-tops, each one having
his innings by turn.

The gray squirrel comes and goes, but the red squirrel we have
always with us. He will live where the gray will starve. He is a
true American; he has nearly all the national traits--nervous
energy, quickness, resourcefulness, pertness, not to say
impudence and conceit. He is not altogether lovely or blameless.
He makes war on the chipmunk, he is a robber of birds' nests, and
is destructive of the orchard fruits. Nearly every man's hand is
against him, yet he thrives, and long may he continue to do so!

One day I placed some over-ripe plums on the wall in front of me
to see what he would do with them. At first he fell eagerly to
releasing the pit, and then to cutting his way to the kernel in
the pit. After one of them had been disposed of in this way, he
proceeded to carry off the others and place them here and there
amid the branches of a plum-tree from which he had stolen every
plum long before they were ripe. A day or two later I noted that
they had all been removed from this tree, and I found some of
them in the forks of an apple-tree not far off.

A small butternut-tree standing near the wall had only a score or
so of butternuts