SQUIRRELS AND SQUIRREL HUNTING. 225 



among the nuts and leaves that he had loved so well, 

 with a few bright spots of his life-blood on them. 

 Poor little beauty! He had thought me his best friend, 

 perhaps, and I had turned out to be his worst, his 

 fatal, foe. As he twitched his last death spasm, the 

 poor little fellow turned his liquid eyes upon me with 

 tearful, unutterable, most pitiful remonstrance. Yes, 

 I had killed him; I had destroyed his life — life that 

 was once so happy and graceful and beautiful among 

 the leafy branches, but now to be swaying, leaping, 

 and chasing, and playing tag among them no more 

 forever. The look of sad reproach in the eyes of a 

 dying squirrel, the death look, as he languishes and 

 quivers in pain, is enough to fill the stoutest heart 

 with the deepest remorse. No eyes among the wild 

 creatures, to my notion, of those I have seen, are so 

 wondrously beautiful as those of the doe and the squir- 

 rel, and none are so frank in their expressions. What 

 beautiful creatures the gray squirrels are! Their eyes, 

 their sleek coat of fur, their sensitive ears and alert 

 body, full of life, teeming and pulsating with living 

 blood — all animals are like them, all constant wonders, 

 perpetual miracles! I do not know that we ought to 

 kill them. 



Yet hunting is one of the most humanizing, if not 

 the most so, of all pursuits that a man can do in the 

 open air. Most of the hunters whom I have known 

 have had natures brimful of the milk of human kind- 

 ness toward all the animals. Old William Cobbett, 

 who was a good friend of the four-footed, argued very 

 strongly in favor of the ethics of hunting, and believed 

 thoroughly in its value. Why, we kill, by proxy, thou- 



