* 

 A STEP-CHILD OF NATURE. ^ 



fox-squirrel and her infant family. She flew at him like 

 a little bull-dog, gave him a snap-bite, and then stood at 

 bay, chattering and switching her tail, but repeated her 

 assault whenever he stirred or as much as turned his 

 eyes in the direction of the nest. The tardo grunted a 

 feeble protest, but offered no resistance, and finally seemed 

 to accept this new phase of his existence as a dispensa- 

 tion of inexorable Fate. The idea of evacuating the 

 basket never suggested itself to his guileless soul. 



My exotic guests have taken their summer-quarters 

 in an old tool-shed with a more or less happy family of 

 indigenous pets, squirrels, gophers, and black-snakes, 

 and the conduct of the smaller boarders at first evinced 

 their deference to the superior size of the foreigners ; 

 but they soon learned to ignore their very existence, or 

 to treat them as locomotive vegetables, whose rights no 

 superior being need respect. The gophers use them as 

 jumping-boards, and usurp their couch with a cool dis- 

 regard of preemption-laws ; the black-snakes sun them- 

 selves on the broad back of the he-sloth, and one of the 

 squirrels has no hesitation in providing herself with 

 nest-building material from his hirsute hide. I have seen 

 a gopher pluck bits of half-chewed apple-peels from the 

 jaws of the patient tardos ; and I believe they would 

 submit to excoriation if one of their neighbors should 

 be in need of a fur cap. 



There is no fun in a sloth ; his motions are limited to 

 a few indispensable functions, and he performs them like 



