96 BOMBAY DUCKS 
But the language of the squirrel on such an occasion 
is as London milk is to neat whisky, when compared 
with what he says when “a lurking villain crow,” who 
has been watching the theft from afar, pounces down 
upon him in the verandah and robs him of his booty. 
Then, indeed, is the wrath of the little mammal a sight 
for the gods! 
It seems to me that the Madras squirrel is especially 
depraved. As I have already said, in Upper India 
the squirrels never, or, at any rate, very rarely, enter 
bungalows. It is true that in that part of the world 
the doors and windows are protected from the inroads 
of insects by chzks, but these are usually so ill-fitting 
as to form no sort of a barrier to a pushing squirrel. 
The fact of the matter is that the Madras squirrel is to 
the squirrel of other parts of India what the cockney is 
to the rustic, or the town sparrow is to his country 
cousin. 
Colonel Cunningham bears me out in this, He 
states that in Calcutta they rarely invade the interior of 
houses, and he ought to know, for he lived there for 
thirty years. The Madras squirrel is as much at home 
among the rafters of a room or in the punka ropes 
as he is among the branches of a tree. He nests by 
preference in the bungalow, and, such are the ways of 
native architects and builders, that the interior of the 
bungalow furnishes endless eligible sites which are 
snatched up as eagerly as unlet houses in Madras at 
the beginning of the winter season. 
Not being a dog in the manger and having no use for 
the various crannies under the roof, I should have no 
