166 NEIGHBOURS UNKNOWN 



tionately large and prominent, with a vague- 

 ness of depth which made them seem all pupil, 

 stared after them mildly from the refuge of a 

 high crotched branch. Unhurt, even un- 

 bewildered by his dizzy plunge, he had bounced 

 aside with a motion too swift for his enemies' 

 eyes to follow, and placed a tree-trunk be- 

 tween himself and peril. Darting up the 

 trunk like a fleeting brown streak, he had 

 been safely hidden before his enemies reached 

 the tree. 



In his high retreat, the flying-squirrel did 

 not crouch as a red squirrel would have done, 

 but lay stretched and spread out as if flat- 

 tened by violence upon the bark. His colour, 

 of an obscure warm brown, faintly smudged 

 with a darker tone, blended so perfectly with 

 the hue of the bark that, if the eye once 

 looked away, it could with difficulty detect 

 him again. A member of a little-known 

 branch of the flying-squirrel family the 

 flying-squirrel of Eastern Canada he was 

 nearly a foot in length, some two inches 

 longer than the common flying-squirrel, from 

 whom he differed also very sharply in colour, 

 his retiring brown and grey being in marked 

 contrast to the buff and drab and pure white 

 of his lesser but more famous cousin. Buff 

 and white would have been so conspicuous a 



