A SQUIRREL AND CAT STORY 
27 
the half-dozen tufted duck and pochard that have latterly stayed 
on the Dales Lake. My black spaniel, rolling on his back, 
brought the former quite close this afternoon and elicited a note 
of enquiry, “tucker wucker.” Nearer the village a vixen is 
audible — that weird and uncanny sound, half bark, half wail, so 
common in Northants. The teal are “ fluting ” round the 
reservoir ; high overhead comes the “ wheet, wheet ” of the 
green sandpiper ; there is the plash of a coot, and the large 
shadow is a heron alighting in the brook which feeds the 
reservoir. .\n odd snipe or so spring up as we walk up its bank 
with that crisp note of theirs, and nearing home we hear that 
sound of the night (which has puzzled so many a bird-lover), 
“ thuck, thuck,” over the tower of our lovely church. It is a 
moorhen going to visit some garden or farmyard in the village, 
and at times I see them on my lawn in the early morning, 
though their home-pond is nearly two miles away. Yes, there is 
something fascinating even in early March in the study of the 
voices of the twilight. And what of the summer ? Ah ! one 
lives again some balmy evening when the moths flutter in the 
ridings of the hazel-woods, and the silent stroke of the barn 
owl’s wings plays on your face as it passes. We approach a 
nightjar “ whirring ” on a pollard stump, and the sound is 
melodious and full at a few yards’ distance, and against the sky 
we may perchance see one settle crossways on the outer twigs of 
an oak (as 1 have done in Sussex). The reeling of the grass- 
hopper warbler, which creeps up the herbage or the blackthorn 
bush like a mouse and utters its curious note at the top, may be 
audible, or the babble of the sedge-warbler. 
At times, too, some lark or yellowhammer awakes from 
slumber and treats us to a snatch of song ; some belated magpie 
chatters as we listen for the master-singer of them all — the nightin- 
gale. Sad in its commencement, its end is joyous to the full. On 
all sides it is re-echoed (I have counted fourteen at once in West 
Sussex) as we homeward go. Only one voice surpasses it — the 
voice of the woman you love best in the world, and she is asking 
what you have heard as a wanderer of the night. 
Haselbeech Rectory, . A. Sh.\w. 
Northampton. 
A SQUIRREL AND CAT STORY. 
NE day last year, a boy was roaming the woods near 
Dunblane, Perthshire, when he found two young 
squirrels, which had either fallen from the nest or had 
ventured on their first outing. Boy like, he took them 
to his home to make pets of them. They were very helpless, 
their eyes being scarcely opened and evidently unaccustomed 
to light, and their bodies were covered with a short thick fur. 
The first difficulty was to feed them, and various expedients 
