90 COLIN CLOUT'S CALENDAR. 



by the field-mouse. But although I knew the squirrel 

 was there by circumstantial evidence, I had never seen 

 him till after the great storm tore up the tree, roots and 

 all, and strewed it, a huge ruin, right across the face of 

 the park close by the gate-house. Even then he did not 

 at once desert his home, before the labourers began hack- 

 ing off the branches : when he quietly betook himself 

 with his family to a neighbouring oak, whither he has 

 since transferred by night the scanty remainder of his 

 spring hoard. 



The relics of the hoard are still to be seen in the 

 abandoned hole, a deep recess where a gnarled bough 

 had made a natural scar, improved upon with careful art 

 by many generations of squirrels. There are acorn-skins, 

 split shells of cob-nuts, beech-mast, and other mouldering 

 spoils in plenty the ancestral shards of many a winter 

 feast. Indeed, it is curious how the trees and the animals 

 have managed in this matter so cleverly to outwit each 

 other in the see-saw of continuous adaptation. For the 

 nuts have acquired their hard shells to get the better of 

 the squirrels ; and the squirrels have acquired their long 

 pointed teeth to get the better of the nut-shells. Yet 

 even at the present day, when the balance of victory 

 apparently inclines for the moment to the side of the 

 squirrel, the trees are not without their occasional 

 revenge : since some nuts either prove too hard for the 

 depredators or are forgotten in the abundance of sup- 

 plies ; and so it has happened that, in certain recorded 

 cases, the existence of young seedlings in wild places 

 has been demonstrably traced to an abandoned hoard, 

 which has afforded a good supply of rich manure to the 

 germinating embryos. 



