e laughter. "What a ridiculous
thing you are, to be sure!" he seems to say; "how clumsy and awkward,
and what a poor show for a tail! Look at me, look at me!"--and he capers
about in his best style. Again, he would seem to tease you and provoke
your attention; then suddenly assumes a tone of good-natured, childlike
defiance and derision. That pretty little imp, the chipmunk, will sit on
the stone above his den and defy you, as plainly as if he said so, to
catch him before he can get into his hole if you can.

A hard winter affects the chipmunks very little; they are snug and warm
in their burrows in the ground and under the rocks, with a bountiful
store of nuts or grain. I have heard of nearly a half-bushel of
chestnuts being taken from a single den. They usually hole up in
November, and do not come out again till March or April, unless the
winter is very open and mild. Gray squirrels, when they have been partly
domesticated in parks and groves near dwellings, are said to hide their
nuts here and there upon the ground, and in winter to dig them up from
beneath the snow, always hitting the spot accurately.

The red squirrel lays up no stores like the provident chipmunk, but
scours about for food in all weathers, feeding upon the seeds in the
cones of the hemlock that still cling to the tree, upon sumac-bobs, and
the seeds of frozen apples. I have seen the ground under a wild
apple-tree that stood near the woods completely covered with the
"chonkings" of the frozen apples, the work of the squirrels in getting
at the seeds; not an apple had been left, and apparently not a seed had
been lost. But the squirrels in this particular locality evidently got
pretty hard up before spring, for they developed a new source of
food-supply. A young bushy-topped sugar-maple, about forty feet high,
standing beside a stone fence near the woods, was attacked, and more
than half denuded of its bark. The object of the squirrels seemed to be
to get at the soft, white, mucilaginous substance (cambium layer)
between the bark and the wood. The ground was covered with fragments of
the bark, and the white, naked stems and branches had been scraped by
fine teeth. When the sap starts in the early spring, the squirrels add
this to their scanty supplies. They perforate the bark of the branches
of the maples with their chisel-like teeth, and suck the sweet liquid
as it slowly oozes out. It is not much as food, but evidently it helps.

I have said th