One day a gray squirrel came along on the stone wall beside the
road. In front of the house he crossed an open barway, and then
paused to observe two men at work in full view near the house.
The men were a sculptor, pottering with clay, and his model. The
squirrel sprang up a near-by butternut-tree, sat down on a limb,
and had a good, long look. "Very suspicious," he seemed to think;
"maybe they are fixing a trap for me"; and he deliberately came
down the tree and returned the way he had come, spinning along
the top of the wall, his long, fine tail outlined by a narrow
band of silver as he sped off toward the woods.

VI

WILD LIFE IN WINTER

To many forms of life of our northern lands, winter means a long
sleep; to others it means what it means to many fortunate human
beings--travels in warm climes; to still others, who again have
their human prototypes, it means a struggle, more or less fierce,
to keep soul and body together; while to many insect forms it
means death.

Most of the flies and beetles, wasps and hornets, moths,
butterflies, and bumblebees die. The grasshoppers all die, with
eggs for next season's crop deposited in the ground. Some of the
butterflies winter over. The mourning cloak, the first butterfly
to be seen in spring, has passed the winter in my "Slabsides."
The monarch migrates, probably the only one of our butterflies
that does. It is a great flyer. I have seen it in the fall
sailing serenely along over the inferno of New York streets. It
has crossed the ocean and is spreading over the world. The yellow
and black hornets lose heart as autumn comes on, desert their
paper nests and die--all but the queen or mother hornet; she
hunts out a retreat in the ground and passes the winter beyond
the reach of frost. In the spring she comes forth and begins life
anew, starting a little cone-shaped paper nest, building a few
paper cells, laying an egg in each, and thus starting the new
colony.

The same is true of the bumblebees; they are the creatures of a
summer. In August, when the flowers fail, the colony breaks up,
they desert the nest and pick up a precarious subsistence on
asters and thistles till the frosts of October cut them off. You
may often see, in late September or early October, these tramp
bees passing the night or a cold rain-storm on the lee side of a
thistle-head. The queen bee alone survives. You never see her
playing the vagabond in the fall. At least I never have. She