it, the finely broken nutmeats.

The blue jays were routed quite by accident. The support of my box, a
strip of wood running from the underside of that little feeding table
to the house wall, had loosened its lower nail, and one day, when some
passing touch of grippe kept me in bed, with Sigurd sitting upright on
a chair beside me, playing nurse, a plump jay lit heavily upon the edge
of the shelf and screeched with fright as it shook and slid beneath
him. He took to his glossy wings and, within five minutes, the oak hard
by was alive with our whole colony of blue jays, all eying that box and
deep in agitated discussion. At last one venturesome fellow struck
boldly out and lit on it, only to feel it sway and sag and, with a
shriek rivaling that of his predecessor, flapped up just in time to
save himself, as he believed, from a terrific disaster. This
performance was repeated twice more and then the whole blue jay crew
abandoned, for the rest of the winter, not only their attacks on my
particular bird box, though its support was promptly made secure, but
on all the bird boxes of the house. Sigurd and I were well content as
we heard them croaking to one another, "A trap! Jam my feathers, a
hateful, human trap! But they couldn't hoodwink _us_. Yah, yah, yah!"

The squirrels, however, continued to be Sigurd's chief household care.
Out of doors, too, he was forever chasing them, but never, to my
knowledge, so much as brushed the tail of one. In his sleep, he often
seemed to be dreaming of a squirrel hunt, his feet running eagerly even
while his body lay at full stretch upon the rug, and his breath coming
in short pants. Sometimes he would howl in nightmare slumbers, but
generally he appeared elate, climbing, perhaps, the trees of Dreamland,
less slippery than our icy oaks, and driving out his enemies from their
loftiest fastness.

Sigurd bore no grudges and when, as the pussy-willows, anemones and
violets, the robins and the orioles were bringing in the spring, he was
called upon to adorn a blue jay funeral procession, he wore his black
ribbon with decorum. The chief mourner, a little lad by name of
Wallace, was one of our nearest neighbors and most honored friends. He
had been much perturbed in spirit over the perils of the blue jay brood
whose nursery, so reckless were their parents, tilted precariously on a
pine branch that overhung a ledge just beyond one end of Wallace's
porch. He feared every wind would overthrow that