I0 2 ZOOLOGICAL SKETCHES. 



generally the approach of their mother was greeted by 

 a chorus of voices that justified the surname of the 

 species. 



Squirrels, pheasants, and some other cautious nest- 

 builders show the same ingenuity in choosing an im- 

 promptu hiding-place; wounded partridges often crouch 

 motionless between the twigs of a small bush where 

 no a priori philosopher would suspect their presence. 



Colonel S , a great hunter before the Lord, and 



proprietor of a sylvan Tusculum near Huntsville, Ala- 

 bama, in repairing the lath-work of his vine-arbor 

 happened to inspect a part of the roof that had never 

 been visited by the grape-gatherers, when down jumped 

 an animal which the astonished Nimrod recognized as 

 a black-tail fox, an old offender, for whose special bene- 

 fit the sporting fraternity of the county had been under 

 arms that very morning. No one had dreamed of 

 beating the enclosed garden, and Master Black-tail had 

 evidently ascertained by experience that procul de Jove 

 procul de fulmine is a rule with occasional exceptions. 

 Musk-rats, too, have a knack of burrowing in the most 

 unexpected spots of a frequented river-bank. Indeed, 

 all much-hunted animals seem to find by a sort of intu- 

 ition the safest and most out-of-the-way places of refuge. 

 This instinct may, after all, furnish the right solution of 

 a problem that has puzzled more than one speculative 

 philosopher, — the question, namely, where animals bury 

 their dead : 



