UNDER THE APPLE-TREES 
out of the camp and off into the stone wall, with 
great spitefulness. All-the-year-round love among 
the wild creatures is very rare, if it occurs at all. 
Love is seasonal and brief among most of them. 
My little recluse has ample supplies for quite a 
family, but I am certain he will spend the winter 
alone there in the darkness of his subterranean 
dwelling. He must have at least a peck of nuts that 
we gave him, besides all the supplies that he carried 
in from his foraging about the orchard and the fields 
earlier in the season. The temptation to dig down 
and uncover his treasures is very great, but my curi- 
osity might lead to his undoing, at least to his seri- 
ous discomfort, so I shall forbear, resting content in 
the thought that at least one fellow mortal has got 
all that his heart desires. 
As our lives have touched here at my writing- 
table, each working out his life-problems, I have 
thought of what a gulf divides my little friend and 
me; yet he is as earnestly solving his problems as I 
am mine; though, of course, he does not worry over 
them, or take thought of them, as I do. I cannot 
even say that something not himself takes thought 
for him; there is no thought in the matter; there is 
what we have to call impulse, instinct, inherited 
habit, and the like, though these are only terms for 
mysteries. He, too, shares in this wonderful some- 
thing we call life. The evolutionary struggle and 
unfolding was for him as well as for me. He, too, is 
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