THE MUSEUM. 



87 



life start up •■housekeeping" for the 

 summer of '99. and in February the 

 oologist was in Texas for instance care- 

 fully lifting out sets of Caracara, Tur- 

 key \'ulture. and other nice things 

 and even now is making daily finds 

 that would set a northern oologest half 

 cra/y. The ornithologist who wishes 

 to fill his cabinet with line skins could 

 nowhere in the United States find a 

 finer field for shooting than from Gal- 

 veston to the Nfexican border from 

 February ist to April 1st. The var- 

 iety and countless thousands of bird 

 life in the numerous bays that indent 

 South Texas is absolutely beyond de- 

 scription. 



Our California brethern are also 

 hustling thise days and already are 

 making records among the birds. One 

 of our latiy subscribers writes of spend- 

 ing two weeks along the beaches in 

 Southern Calforhia in February, with 

 a summer dress and sun bonnet on 

 seeking pretty shells at the low tide, 

 while ye editor was hustling buckets of 

 codi into various stoves to keep the 

 winter blasts 10° below zero from 

 freezing us tiitirely Even now as the 

 spring bree/es begin to blow occasion- 

 ally and oiil)- tlie other day we saw a 

 robin sunniug himself on the lawn as 

 our postman hands us a letter from 

 one of our Monitaba subscribers where 

 he tells us of the 20 and 30 o below 

 zero that still prevails around his little 

 home. 



Thus we see the Museum reaches a 

 great variety of climates and a great 

 variety of collectors on its monthly vis- 

 its We wish we might more forci- 

 bly impress on every subscriber the 

 value of putting his brief notes of col- 

 lecting, trips, finds, and so on, in 

 print. 



Our Monitaba friend for instance 

 has possibly always lived there and it 

 seems like an old story to him and he 

 thinks it would not interest others. 



Our California friends think the 

 same, our Texas friends likewise, and 

 our New Brunswick, Nova Scotianand 

 even Prince Edward Island friends 



think nothing they could write would 

 be of special interest, but let me pick 

 6 to 10 of you and |>lace jou around a 

 warm fire and set you to visiting, and 

 the charices are you would see no sleep 

 that night. 



We can speak from experience, viz: 

 Not such a very long time ago we 

 were to ride all night in a sleeper. 

 Met a Honolula man and visited right 

 through to daylight, hardly thinking of 

 the sleeper ticket in my pocket. I 

 could repeat a hundred instances of a 

 somewhat similar nature. 



Now we shall likely not ever meet 

 all of our subscribers and "talk it 

 over," but let us hear from jou through 

 the Museum. It will interest us, it 

 will permanently put your notes on re- 

 cord and will interest over 1,000 other 

 collectors all over this vast country 

 and many collectois in foreign landsj 



I am going to conclude this "after 

 breakfast reminescence" with a true 

 story that occurred last summer in our 

 adjoining county on the west. The 

 family is well known to me from early 

 boyhood, and what I relate was seen 

 myself. Their little son of 12 years, 

 somewhat of a naturalist, possessed a 

 cat with 4 kittens only a few days old. 

 They had a sufficient stock of cats and 

 really wanted to get rid of the kittens. 

 One day as ihey were a week or so 

 old, the boy with his dog dug out a 

 woodchuck Arctomys moiiax and there 

 found a nest of little ones, 2 of which 

 he brought to the house and substitut- 

 ed for I kittens. The cat evidently 

 liked the new comers all right and to 

 all appearances "didn't know the dif- 

 ference." A day or 2 later the boy 

 was chopping up a dead and rotten 

 apple tree and splitting open the tree 

 found a hest of little red squirrels, 

 [Sciitrus hudsonius) which were very 

 young, scarcely having any fur. He 

 took one of these and substituted for 

 another kitten, which the cat also took 

 into the family apparently with good 

 grace. \\'e had heard of this circum- 

 stance and passing by the place one 

 day early last summer we stopped and 



