t way, but never getting
on more than half a rod at a time; and then suddenly pausing with a
ludicrous expression and a gratuitous somerset, as if all the eyes in
the universe were fixed on him--for all the motions of a squirrel, even
in the most solitary recesses of the forest, imply spectators as much as
those of a dancing girl--wasting more time in delay and circumspection
than would have sufficed to walk the whole distance--I never saw one
walk--and then suddenly, before you could say Jack Robinson, he would be
in the top of a young pitch-pine, winding up his clock and chiding all
imaginary spectators, soliloquizing and talking to all the universe at
the same time--for no reason that I could ever detect, or he himself was
aware of, I suspect.

At length he would reach the corn, and selecting a suitable ear, brisk
about in the same uncertain trigonometrical way to the topmost stick of
my wood-pile, before my window, where he looked me in the face, and
there sit for hours, supplying himself with a new ear from time to time,
nibbling at first voraciously and throwing the half-naked cobs about;
till at length he grew more dainty still and played with his food,
tasting only the inside of the kernel, and the ear, which was held
balanced over the stick by one paw, slipped from his careless grasp and
fell to the ground, when he would look over at it with a ludicrous
expression of uncertainty, as if suspecting that it had life, with a
mind not made up whether to get it again, or a new one, or be off; now
thinking of corn, then listening to hear what was in the wind. So the
little impudent fellow would waste many an ear in a forenoon; till at
last, seizing some longer and plumper one, considerably bigger than
himself, and skilfully balancing it, he would set out with it to the
woods, like a tiger with a buffalo, by the same zigzag course and
frequent pauses, scratching along with it as if it were too heavy for
him and falling all the while, making its fall a diagonal between a
perpendicular and horizontal, being determined to put it through at any
rate--a singularly frivolous and whimsical fellow--and so he would get
off with it to where he lived, perhaps carry it to the top of a pine
tree forty or fifty rods distant, and I would afterward find the cobs
strewed about the woods in various directions.

At length the jays arrived, whose discordant screams were heard long
before, as they were warily making their approach an eigh