al. 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 inconceivable haste with his "trotters," as if it were
for a wager, and now as many paces that way, but never getting on more
than half a rod at a time; and then suddenly pausing with a ludicrous
expression and a gratuitous somerset, as if all the eyes in the universe
were eyed on him--for all the motions of a squirrel, even in the most
solitary recesses of the forest, imply spectators as much as those of a
dancing girl--wasting more time in delay and circumspection than would
have sufficed 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
spectators, 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, frisk about in the same uncertain trigonometrical way to
the topmost 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 cobs about; till at length he grew more dainty still and
played with his food, tasting only the inside of the kernel, and the
ear, which was held balanced over the stick by one paw, slipped from
his careless grasp and fell to the ground, when he would look over at it
with a ludicrous expression of uncertainty, as if suspecting that it had
life, with a mind not made up whether to get it again, or a new one,
or be off; now thinking of corn, then listening to hear what was in
the wind. So the little impudent fellow would waste many an ear in
a forenoon; till at last, seizing some longer and plumper one,
considerably bigger than himself, and skilfully balancing it, he would
set out with it to the woods, like a tiger with a buffalo, by the same
zig-zag course and frequent pauses, scratching along with it as if it
were too heavy for him and falling all the while, making its fall a
diagonal between a perpendicular and horizontal, being determined to