, after allowing time enough for a
good square meal, I made haste to get him out of the nut-box and shut
him up in a spare bedroom, in which father had hung a lot of selected
ears of Indian corn for seed. They were hung up by the husks on cords
stretched across from side to side of the room. The squirrel managed
to jump from the top of one of the bed-posts to the cord, cut off an
ear, and let it drop to the floor. He then jumped down, got a good
grip of the heavy ear, carried it to the top of one of the slippery,
polished bed-posts, seated himself comfortably, and, holding it well
balanced, deliberately pried out one kernel at a time with his long
chisel teeth, ate the soft, sweet germ, and dropped the hard part of
the kernel. In this masterly way, working at high speed, he demolished
several ears a day, and with a good warm bed in a box made himself at
home and grew fat. Then naturally, I suppose, free romping in the snow
and tree-tops with companions came to mind. Anyhow he began to look
for a way of escape. Of course he first tried the window, but found
that his teeth made no impression on the glass. Next he tried the
sash and gnawed the wood off level with the glass; then father
happened to come upstairs and discovered the mischief that was being
done to his seed corn and window and immediately ordered him out of
the house.
The flying squirrel was one of the most interesting of the little
animals we found in the woods, a beautiful brown creature, with fine
eyes and smooth, soft fur like that of a mole or field mouse. He is
about half as long as the gray squirrel, but his wide-spread tail and
the folds of skin along his sides that form the wings make him look
broad and flat, something like a kite. In the evenings our cat often
brought them to her kittens at the shanty, and later we saw them fly
during the day from the trees we were chopping. They jumped and glided
off smoothly and apparently without effort, like birds, as soon as
they heard and felt the breaking shock of the strained fibres at the
stump, when the trees they were in began to totter and groan. They can
fly, or rather glide, twenty or thirty yards from the top of a tree
twenty or thirty feet high to the foot of another, gliding upward as
they reach the trunk, or if the distance is too great they alight
comfortably on the ground and make haste to the nearest tree, and
climb just like the wingless squirrels.
Every boy and girl loves the little fairy,
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