SOUTH RAIN 



land. I studied him carefully, thinking, 

 indeed, that he might vanish at any mo- 

 ment, and then I went out into the woods 

 in the soft south rain, only to find that 

 his colors that I thought so marvelous in 

 the shadow of the four walls of my room 

 were reproduced in rich profusion all 

 about me. 



His velvety- white markings, lined. and 

 touched off with bro\vn so deep in places 

 as to be either purple with density or 

 black, were those of the birch trunks all 

 about me, and there were the rufous tints 

 that shaded down into pearl pinks and 

 lavender all through the groups of distant 

 birch twigs. His gray fur was the soft- 

 est and richest of the fur of the gray 

 squirrels, and this gray again shaded into 

 red in spots that could be matched only 

 by the fur of the red 'squirrel. There 



were soft tans on him of varying shades, 

 ii 



