36 THE RING OF NATURE 



this side and that, then come and show off just 

 like so many small boys anxious to attract atten- 

 tion. They dare one another to come near to you, 

 fight one another to show what brave fellows they 

 are, pretend great alarm when you move, and only 

 when you treat them very badly will they shout 

 and swear at you, as they will when the woods are 

 bare and life is perhaps a little annoying. 



One summer habit of the squirrel leads forcibly 

 to the conviction that he loves a practical joke. 

 He takes his food to the top of the tree under which 

 you are sitting. There he tears it to pieces, be it 

 green pine-cones or what not, and the rejected 

 fragments bump through the branches and fall 

 with wonderful precision on and round the big 

 non-climbing biped on the ground. There is no 

 finer picture of summer peace than to stand under 

 a beech sixty or seventy feet high, whose trunk is 

 completely lost as soon as it pierces the first tier 

 of leaves, to hear the faint ticking of the little 

 animal's teeth, and to see the husks of beech mast, 

 as though thrown from a fairyland above the 

 bean-stalk, come trickling down. 



