now. One day when I rapped, something else appeared at the
door--I could not make out what. I continued my rapping, when out came
two flying-squirrels. On the tree being given a vigorous shake, it
broke off at the hole, and the squirrels went sliding down the air to
the foot of a hemlock, up which they disappeared. They had
dispossessed Downy of his house, had carried in some grass and leaves
for a nest, and were as snug as a bug in a rug. Downy drilled another
cell in a dead oak farther up the hill, and, I hope, passed the winter
there unmolested. Such incidents, comic or tragic, as they chance to
strike us, are happening all about us, if we have eyes to see them.

The next season, near sundown of a late November day, I saw Downy
trying to get possession of a hole not his own. I chanced to be
passing under a maple, when white chips upon the ground again caused
me to scrutinize the branches overhead. Just then I saw Downy come to
the tree, and, hopping around on the under side of a large dry limb,
begin to make passes at something with his beak. Presently I made out
a round hole there, with something in it returning Downy's thrusts.
The sparring continued some moments. Downy would hop away a few feet,
then return to the attack, each time to be met by the occupant of the
hole. I suspected an English sparrow had taken possession of Downy's
cell in his absence during the day, but I was wrong. Downy flew to
another branch, and I tossed up a stone against the one that contained
the hole, when, with a sharp, steely note, out came a hairy woodpecker
and alighted on a near-by branch. Downy, then, had the "cheek" to try
to turn his large rival out of doors--and it was Hairy's cell, too;
one could see that by the size of the entrance. Thus loosely does the
rule of _meum_ and _tuum_ obtain in the woods. There is no moral code
in nature. Might reads right. Man in communities has evolved ethical
standards of conduct, but nations, in their dealings with one another,
are still largely in a state of savage nature, and seek to establish
the right, as dogs do, by the appeal to battle.

One season a wood duck laid her eggs in a cavity in the top of a tall
yellow birch near the spring that supplies my cabin with water. A bold
climber "shinned" up the fifty or sixty feet of rough tree-trunk and
looked in upon the eleven eggs. They were beyond the reach of his arm,
in a well-like cavity over three feet deep. How would the mother duck
get h