NOTES BY THE WAY 



squirrels know the same trick, only their coat-skirts 

 are not so broad. One day my dog treed a red 

 squirrel in a tall hickory that stood in a meadow 

 on the side of a steep hill. To see what the squir- 

 rel would do when closely pressed, I climbed the 

 tree. As I drew near, he took refuge in the topmost 

 branch, and then, as I came on, he boldly leaped 

 into the air, spread himself out upon it, and, with 

 a quick, tremulous motion of his tail and legs, de- 

 scended quite slowly and landed upon the ground 

 thirty feet below me, apparently none the worse for 

 the leap, for he ran with great speed and escaped the 

 dog in another tree. 



A recent American traveler in Mexico gives a 

 still more striking instance of this power of squir- 

 rels partially to neutralize the force of gravity when 

 leaping or falling through the air. Some boys had 

 caught a Mexican black squirrel, nearly as large as 

 a cat. It had escaped from them once, and, when 

 pursued, had taken a leap of sixty feet, from the top 

 of a pine-tree down upon the roof of a house, without 

 injury. This feat had led the grandmother of one 

 of the boys to declare that the squirrel was be- 

 witched, and the boys proposed to put the matter 

 to further test by throwing the squirrel down a pre- 

 cipice six hundred feet high. Our traveler inter- 

 fered, to see that the squirrel had fair play. The 

 prisoner was conveyed in a pillow-slip to the edge 

 of the cliff, and the slip opened, so that he might 

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