18 MASSACHUSETTS AGRICULTURE. 



directly to a nut or a pine-cone, as directly as if they had started 

 from it and bored upward — which you and I could not have 

 done. It would be difficult for us to find one before the snow 

 falls. Commonly, no doubt, they had deposited them there 

 in the fall. You wonder if they remember the localities, or 

 discover them by the scent. The red squirrel commonly has 

 its winter abode in the earth under a thicket of evergreens, 

 frequently under a small clump of evergreens in the midst of 

 a deciduous wood. If there are any nut-trees, which still 

 retain their nuts, standing at a distance without the wood, 

 their paths often lead directly to and from them. We, there- 

 fore, need not suppose an oak standing here and there in the 

 wood in order to seed it, but if a few stand within twenty or 

 thirty rods of it, it is sufficient. 



I think that I may venture to say that every white-pine cone 

 that falls to the earth naturally in this town, before opening 

 and losing its seeds, and almost every pitch-pine one that falls 

 at all, is cut off by a squirrel, and they begin to pluck them 

 long before they are ripe, so that when the crop of white-pine 

 cones is a small one, as it commonly is, they cut off thus 

 almost every one of these before it fairly ripens. I think, 

 moreover, that their design, if I may so speak, in cutting 

 them off green, is, partly, to prevent their opening and losing 

 their seeds, for these are the ones for which they dig through 

 the snow, and the only white-pine cones which contain any thing 

 then. I have counted in one heap, v/ithin a diameter of four 

 feet, the cores of 239^ pitch-pine cones which had been cut off 

 and stripped by the red squirrel the previous winter. 



The nuts thus left on the surface, or buried just beneath it, 

 are placed in the most favorable circumstances for germinating. 

 I have sometimes wondered how those which merely fell on the 

 surface of the earth got planted ; but by the end of December, 

 I find the chestnuts of the same year partially mixed with the 

 mould, as it were, under the decaying and mouldy leaves, where 

 there is all the moisture and manure they want, for the nuts 

 fall first. In a plentiful year, a large proportion of the nuts 

 are thus covered loosely an inch deep, and are, of course, 

 somewhat concealed from squirrels. One winter, when the 

 crop had been abundant, I got, with the aid of a rake, many 

 quarts of these nuts as late as the 10th of January, and though 



