too much frightened and discouraged to eat while thus imprisoned after the rough handling he had suffered.  I soon learned, however, that sympathy in this direction was wasted, for no sooner did I pop him in than he fell to with right hearty appetite, gnawing and munching the nuts as if he had gathered them himself and was very hungry that day.  Therefore, 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.