Mercury 



William Trelease 

 Professor of Botany, University of Illinois 



It was a May afternoon. I had been watching the bees on the 

 huckleberry bells. As I loitered home from the woods, I ran across 

 the boy in the case : a boy of ten, who had never before spent a 

 spring in the real country. To-day he was standing by the bars 

 of a rail fence with another boy, a few years older than he, appar- 

 ently thinking of nothing out of the ordinary. As I came up and 

 spoke to them while getting through the fence he said, quite 

 casually, "Papa, I've got a surprise for you at the house." The 

 story of Sputs, the red squirrel, was fresh in my mind (but that's 

 another story) — and, thinking that I understood, I said that we 

 would go right up and look at it. "It's the bestest surprise on 

 Earth," he added, and I knew that I didn't understand. 



So I was introduced to Mercury, young but full grown and too 

 little accustomed to our crude ways to be handled without gloves. 

 And so he continued for three weeks and I had begun to think that 

 I should never establish relations with him, until one day he came 

 down from the portiere rod to get a nut out of my hand and I 

 found that though he scolded and bit, he no longer bit to hurt, but 

 tugged and scratched and mouthed a finger as a kitten does a hand. 



Neither the city boy nor the country boy had ever seen this shy 

 little type of body before : the one, because it lives in the woods ; 

 the other because it is abroad at night and sleeps through the day 

 when it can. The story of the disco very was an interesting one. 

 Boylike, they had kicked against a dead birch stub; the older boy 

 had seen a dry leaf float away from it, and the younger boy had 

 said that that sort of leaf must be a flying squirrel though he had 

 never seen one before. 



How for a time Mercury lived in a gauze-covered fish globe' 

 how he traveled a thousand miles in a pint jar with perfection top, 

 carried in a coat pocket, taking his outing in the sleeper to the 

 terror of the porter; and how he came to own a coat room and to 

 shake down his bed where he pleased — in pocket, hat or bonnet; 

 these are chapters that do not need to be written. But it is differ- 

 ent with his daytime doings, for then his home was a side pocket 

 of my coat, and his chair at dinner the handkerchief pocket of the 

 same coat, out of which he put his little arms and gracefully ate 



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