not until she did bite, and sharply too, would they be off. All this
seemed very strange and unnatural; yet a stranger thing happened one day,
when Calico brought in to her family a full-grown gray squirrel which she
had caught in the woods. She laid it down on the floor and called the
kittens and squirrels to gather around. They came, and as the squirrels
sniffed at the dead one on the floor there was hardly a mark of
difference in their appearance. It might have been one of Calico's own
nursing that lay there dead, so far as any one save Calico could see. And
with her the difference, I think, was more of smell than of sight. But she
knew her own; and though she often found her two out among the trees of
the yard, she never was mistaken, nor for an instant made as if to hurt
them.

Yet they could not have been more entirely squirrel had their own squirrel
mother nurtured them. Calico's milk and love went all to cat in her own
kittens, and all to squirrel in these that she adopted. No single hair of
theirs turned from its squirrel-gray to any one of Calico's three colors;
no single squirrel trait became the least bit catlike.

Indeed, as soon as the squirrels could run about they forsook the
clumsy-footed kittens under the stove and scampered up back of the
hot-water tank, where they built a nest. Whenever Calico entered the
kitchen purring, out would pop their heads, and down they would come,
understanding the mother language as well as the kittens, and usually
beating the kittens to the mother's side.

So far from teaching them to climb and build nests behind water-tanks,
their foster-mother never got over her astonishment at it. All they needed
from her, all they needed and would have received from their own squirrel
mother, was nourishment and protection until their teeth and legs grew
strong. Wits were born with them; experience was sure to come to them; and
with wits and experience there is nothing known among squirrels of their
kind that these two would not learn for themselves.

And there was not much known to squirrels that these two did not know,
apparently without even learning. As they grew in size they increased
exceedingly in naughtiness, and were banished shortly from the kitchen to
an ell or back woodshed. They celebrated this distinction by dropping some
hickory-nuts into a rubber boot hanging on the wall, and then gnawing a
hole through the toe of the boot in order to extract the hidden nuts. Was
it