30 WAYS OF THE SIX-FOOTED 



feel of my hand with his palpi to discover if perchance 

 I were good to eat. Then a red squirrel darted up a 

 young ash tree in front of me, the dark stripe on his 

 side where the red and white meet being particularly 

 vivid and dashing ; at first he sneezed and coughed his 

 displeasure at my intrusion and then sprang his rattle 

 so suddenly that I wondered if it might be that squir- 

 rels have secreted in them storage batteries that may 

 be switched at will from action to sound. Then a great 

 butterfly, a tiger swallowtail, came careening down 

 through a hole in my leaf canopy and alighted on a 

 sunlit bush near me ; there, in utter luxuriousness, he 

 slowly opened and shut his wings in obvious enjoyment 

 of his sun-bath. While watching him I noticed that 

 the maple sapling, on which he was resting, was in a 

 bad way ; its leaves were riddled with holes, varying 

 in size from that of a bird shot to that of a small 

 bean. 



Now while I was tired of a world that lectured and 

 talked and argued and did many other noisy things 

 that wore on one's nerves, I was by no means tired 

 of the great silent world that did things and made 

 no fuss about doing them. So, when my butterfly 

 drifted away, I lazily began to investigate the cause 

 of the dilapidation of the maple leaves. There I 

 found, as I suspected at first glance, a little nomad 



