290 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS 



like the flattened skin of a squirrel, with the four paws 

 visible at the corners. When he had sufficiently en- 

 joyed the sensation of pressing on the pine needles with 

 the under surface of his body, he started up to continue 

 his game, until he suddenly caught sight of a large, 

 yellowish-white agaric growing some yards away, and, 

 dashing at it, he tore it violently from the stalk with 

 his two paws and began devouring it as if mad with 

 hunger, taking huge bites and working his jaws like a 

 chaff-cutter. 



Sitting upright devouring his mushroom, he looked 

 like a quaint little red man eating a round piece of 

 bread-and-butter twice as broad as himself. Then 

 suddenly, after a few more bites, he dashed the mush- 

 room to the ground as if he hated the taste of it, and 

 scampering off out of the hollow, vanished from sight 

 among the trees. 



With such things as these to be seen, the very thought 

 of work gave me a sensation of weariness and disgust: 

 to sit down to a pile of old note-books, some of them 

 more than a year old, patiently and laboriously to sift 

 out two or three observations worth recording out of 

 every hundred, seemed an intolerable burden, and not 

 worth the candle. Even the sight of a black redstart 

 (with greetings from Holland) and the romps of a 

 fantastic squirrel seemed more to me a hundred times 

 than the sights of a year ago. To go back to such 

 stuff was to leave living, breathing, palpitating nature 

 to finger bundles of old faded photographs and muse 

 on dusty memories. Why then go back? Why in- 



