e. He is making sure. Suddenly
he darts toward my outstretched fingers where a peanut is securely
held. He seizes it with his sharp teeth, but I hold on. Then with his
little paws he presses and pushes, while he hangs on to the nut with a
grip that will not be denied. If he doesn't get it all, he succeeds in
snapping off a piece and then, either darting off, with a quick whisk
of his tail, to enjoy it in his chosen seclusion, or, squatting down
on his hind legs, he holds the delicious morsel between his fore-paws
and chews away with a rapidity as astonishing as it is interesting and
amusing.

Now a fat old fellow--he looks like a grandpa in age--comes up. He
is equally suspicious at first, takes his preliminary reconnaissance,
darts forward and just about reaches you, when he darts away again.
Only for a moment however. On he comes, seizes the nut, and eats it
then and there, or darts off with inconceivable rapidity, up the tree
trunk to a branch twenty, forty feet up, and then sits in most cunning
and _cute_ posture, but in just as big a hurry and in equally
excitable fashion to eat his lunch as if he were within reach.

Sometimes half a dozen or more of them, big and little, will surround
you. One leaps upon your knee, another comes into your lap, while
another runs all over your back and shoulders. Now and again two
aim at the same time for the same nut, and then, look out. They are
selfish little beggars and there is an immense amount of human nature
in such tiny creatures. The bigger one wants the morsel and chases
the smaller one away, and he is so mad about it and gets so in earnest
that sometimes he chases the other fellow so far that he forgets
what it was all about. He loses the nut himself, but, anyhow, he has
prevented the other fellow from getting it. How truly human!

Then the younger one, or the smaller one, or the older one, will whisk
himself up a tree, perch on a branch and begin to scold, or he climbs
to the top of a stump, or a rock, or merely stands upright without
any foreign aid, and how he can "Chip, chip, chip, chip!" His piercing
little shriek makes many a stranger to his voice and ways wonder
what little bird it is that has so harsh a cry, and he keeps at it so
persistently that again you say, How human! and you wonder whether it
is husband scolding wife, or wife husband, or--any of the thousand
and one persons who, because they have the power, use it as a right to
scold the other thousand