170 
NATURE NOTES. 
pictures are made of it. Hear what an old poet named George 
Wither says of its having its dinner out in the rain : — 
“ The little squirrel hath no other food 
Than that which Nature’s thrifty hand provides 
And, in purveying up and down the wood, 
She many cold wet storms for that abides. 
“ She lies not heartless in her mossy dray, 
Nor feareth to adventure through the rain ; 
But skippeth out and bears it as she may, 
Until the season waxeth calm again.” 
Just above these verses is a picture of a ‘squirrel sitting up on 
its haunches with a nut in its fore-paws. The rain is coming 
down very heavily. 
A “dray,” you should know, is a nest. Squirrels live 
chiefly in trees, and build their nests sometimes in hollow trunks 
and sometimes in little nooks just where the branches join the 
trunks. They are very clever in making their nests look like 
knots or knobs of wood belonging to the tree itself, so that 
people may not know them to be nests ; and they take care to 
have the outside of them the same colour as the bark of the 
tree. They are made of moss, leaves, woody fibres, and any- 
thing soft that can be picked up, all very neatly woven together. 
Inside lie the baby squirrels, which are fed and tended most 
carefully by their father and mother. 
“ What do squirrels eat ? ” you want to know. Nuts, acorns, 
beechmast, leaf-buds, and the tender shoots of plants. When 
winter is beginning, squirrels gather stores of all these things, 
and lay them up in storehouses. They do not put all their food 
in one place, but seem to think it safer to hide it in many 
places, sometimes in the ground, sometimes in holes in tree- 
trunks. Last autumn our squirrel busied himself in taking up 
a pile of nuts to his bedroom in readiness for the winter. All 
his food is put in at the bottom of his cage, and he either eats it 
there or carries it up to a nice, dark, cosy little bedroom at the 
top. For many days he was hard at work, cracking each nut to 
make sure that it was good, and carrying it up without its shell 
to his private storehouse. He had at last a great heap of nuts. 
They were laid neatly in rows, row upon row, reaching nearly 
to the ceiling. It was amusing to watch master squirrel in such 
earnest preparation for a long cold winter when we, like himself, 
might be in bed all our time and unable to give him any food. 
Do you know how a squirrel gets at the kernel of a nut ? He 
does not crack the shell as we do, but saws a hole in it with his 
four front teeth (two in each jaw), which are sharp and chisel- 
shaped. (Look now in the tool-box for a chisel, and you will 
see what I mean.) On account of the teeth, and the way in 
which the teeth are used, squirrels are called gnawing animals 
or gnawers. 
When the kernel is picked out of the nut its brown skin is 
carefully stripped off. The small creature seems to know that it 
