2 WILD NEIGHBORS CHAP. 
ing into its interior, showing that it is hollow. 
There seems, however, to be no special entrance, 
the inmates pushing their way into the centre, and 
escaping from it wherever it seems easiest to part 
the twigs. I have never seen more than one pair 
at work upon any one nest. The work is done 
mainly in the early morning, and the task is ac- 
complished very speedily. 
I know this particular pair of squirrels very 
well. They have been tenants of the grove ever 
since we came to live in this edge of the city, 
and though the town has now grown beyond and 
around us, and the grove is given a perpetual 
moonlight from the electric lamp on the corner, 
the trees and bushes remain. In midsummer they 
may indulge their fondness for toadstools, upon 
which, during August, they seem almost wholly 
to subsist. Nuts and acorns come with each re- 
turning autumn, and in midwinter provender is 
spread upon friendly window-sills. 
Almost the only advantage the squirrels have 
taken of civilization, however, has been to occupy 
the boxes that my benevolent neighbor, Dr. J. P. 
Phillips, has put up for them in the trees, which 
are tenanted more or less all the year round, one 
family occupying each box and tree by itself as 
long as it wishes, and putting in its own furniture 
— a new bedroom set of grass and soft leaves. Of 
these boxes they distinctly prefer those which are 
simply sections of hollow logs, probably because 
