THE SQUIREEL. 333 



When eating, or occupied in listening, they sit erect on their 

 hind legs, with their long bushy tail raised beautifully along 

 their back, as far as the shoulders, then falling in a graceful 

 curve near the extremity, hangs towards the ground. Their 

 food is always held in their fore-paws. 



. The teeth of the whole race are remarkable for their sharp- 

 ness, power, and durability; they cut with ease, in an in- 

 credibly short time, through the hardest hickory-nut, and have 

 the sagacity to tell a withered or rotten nut from a good one by 

 the mere feel or smell; and no sooner do they pick up one of 

 these bad ones, than they turn it round in their nimble paws 

 and discard it. This fact we have again and again tested with 

 the common Gray Squirrel. The gullet of the Squirrel is said 

 to be very small, or rather contracted at one point, to prevent 

 the food from being disgorged when descending trees. We do 

 not know if such is the fact, and we have no Squirrel handy at 

 this present time to examine. 



The whole race, with one or two exceptions, inhabit the thick 

 woods, living upon the profusion of seeds, acorns, hickory-nuts, 

 chestnuts, and various other nuts that are produced in our rich 

 and grand forests. Several varieties of Squirrels, more espe- 

 cially those at the North, are very provident and thoughtful of 

 the morrow, always collecting and laying up in secret store- 

 houses the surplus food, which they partake of during the 

 Winter season, when the nuts are all shaken by the cold blasts 

 from the trees, and perhaps covered up a foot or more in frozen 

 snow. These well-stocked granaries are generally in the neigh- 

 borhood of their nests, either in the hollow of a tree, in the 

 bottom of an old stump, or in the wide fissure of an overhanging 

 rock. The quantities of nuts thus stowed away by a single 

 Squirrel is sometimes enormous. We have seen as much as a 

 bushel of hickory-nuts, chestnuts, acorns, beech-nuts, chinque- 

 pins, &;c. &e., deposited in one of these spots. The whole, how- 

 ever, may not have been put there by one single individual; 

 the stock, perhaps, having been collected together by several, 

 who made this the general depot for all their contributions, each 

 one laboring for the general good, and each one, in turn, en- 

 titled to his full share of the booty. Each Squirrel, most 

 commonly, has several different storehouses, to which they re- 



