SQUIRRELS AND SQUIRREL HUNTING. 221 



witchery. Mercutio, in "Romeo and Juliet," says of 

 Queen Mab that 



Her chariot is an empty hazel-nut, 

 Made by the joiner squirrel or old grub, 

 Time out of mind the fairies' coachmakers :" 



and in "A Midsummer Night's Dream" Titania says to 

 Bottom, in the wood, 



" I have a venturous fairy that shall seek 



The squirrel's hoard, and fetch thee thence new nuts.' 



William Browne, too, an old poet of the earlier 

 seventeenth century, has left, in his "Brittania's Pas- 

 torals," such a really modern and realistic picture of a 

 squirrel hunt that I give it here entire. It is the best, 

 and only poetic, description of a squirrel hunt that I 

 know of in literature: 



" As a nimble squirrel from the wood, 

 Ranging the hedges for his filbert-food, 

 Sits pertly on a bough his brown nuts cracking, 

 And from the shell the sweet white kernel taking, 

 Till with their crooks and bags a sort of boys, 

 To share with him, come with so great a noise 

 That he is forced to leave a nut nigh broke, 

 And for his life leap to a neighbor oak, 

 Thence to a beech, thence to a row of ashes ; 

 Whilst through the quagmires and red water plashes 

 The boys run dabbling thorough thick and thin, 

 One tears his hose, another breaks his shin, 

 This, torn and tatter'd, hath with much ado 

 Got by the briars ; and that hath lost his shoe : 

 This drops his bands; and that headlong falls for haste ; 

 Another cries behind for being last : 

 With sticks and stones, and many a sounding hollow, 

 The little fool with no small sport they follow, 

 Whilst he from tree to tree, from spray to spray, 

 Gets to the wood, and hides him in his dray." 



