30 SPLASHES OF COLOUR. 
that would smash your, or my, teeth all to 
pieces ; and these he cracked as easily as with 
nut-crackers. 
A scraping of claws on bark, a waving red 
line, as if a piece of the autumn colours 
had been hiding here and suddenly taken life 
again, and 
Now, how on earth did that happen ? 
A ruddy and bright-eyed squirrel, his great 
fiery-red tail curved over his back, was sitting 
up eating an acorn exactly on the spot where 
the hawfinch had been a second before. 
Goodness knows if the squirrel meant to 
eat the hawfinch or the acorns first. Good- 
ness knows if he knew himself, being a 
squirrel. 
Anyway, there he was, a flaming picture 
of dainty, irresponsible, starry-eyed, untrust- 
worthy—from a bird’s point of view—but 
sportive life. He seemed to hold his acorns 
in his hands as a man would, and he knew 
as much as the red bank-voles about starting 
at the soft end; but he, too, like both the 
birds and the voles, was horribly wasteful, 
throwing away quite three out of every four 
acorns he started to gnaw. 
‘Me-e-uw !’ 
Confound that jay! Who on earth would 
have thought that he was going to fly up 
