The Bay of He Band 
step and her foot was fast, when every frantic effort 
for freedom only tangled her the worse. In the nest 
above were four other tiny mummies, —a double 
tragedy that might with care have been averted. 
A similar fate befell a song sparrow that I dis- 
covered hanging dead upon a barbed-wire fence. . By 
some chance it had slipped a foot through an open 
place between the two twisted strands, and then, flut- 
tering along, had wedged the leg and broken it in 
the struggle to escape. 
We have all held our breath at the hazardous trav- 
eling of the squirrels in the treetops. What other 
animals take such risks,—leaping at dizzy heights 
from bending limbs to catch the tips of limbs still 
smaller, saving themselves again and again by the 
merest chance. 
But luck sometimes fails. My brother, a careful 
watcher in the woods, was hunting on one occasion, 
when he sawa gray squirrel miss its footing in a 
tree and fall, breaking its neck upon a log beneath. 
I have frequently known them to fall short dis- 
tances, and once I saw a red squirrel come to grief 
like the gray squirrel above. He was scurrying 
through the tops of some lofty pitch pines, a little 
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