294 
WALDEN. 
out half a bushel of ears of sweet-corn, which had not 
got ripe, on to the snow crust by my door, and was 
amused by watching the motions of the various animals 
which were baited by it. In the twilight and the night 
the rabbits came regularly and made a hearty meal. 
All day long the red squirrels came and went, and 
afforded me much entertainment by their manoeuvres. 
One would approach at first warily through the shrub- 
oaks, running over the snow crust by fits and starts like 
a leaf blown by the wind, now a few paces this way, 
with wonderful speed and waste of energy, making in¬ 
conceivable haste with his “ trotters,” as if it were for a 
wager, and now as many paces that way, but never get¬ 
ting on more than half a rod at a time; and then sud¬ 
denly pausing with a ludicrous expression and a gratui 
tous somerset, as if all the eyes in the universe were 
fixed on him, — for all the motions of a squirrel, even 
in the most solitary recesses of the forest, imply specta¬ 
tors as much as those of a dancing girl, — wasting more 
time in delay and circumspection than would have suf¬ 
ficed to walk the whole distance, — I never saw one 
walk, — and then suddenly, before you could say Jack 
Robinson, he would be in the top of a young pitch-pine, 
winding up his clock and chiding all imaginary specta¬ 
tors, soliloquizing and talking to all the universe at the 
same time, — for no reason that I could ever detect, or 
he himself was aware of, I suspect. At length he 
would reach the corn, and selecting a suitable ear, brisk 
about in the same uncertain trigonometrical way to the 
top-most stick of my wood-pile, before my window, 
where he looked me in the face, and there sit for hours, 
supplying himself with a new ear from time to time, 
nibbling at first voraciously and throwing the half-naked 
