steering for the densest, most impenetrable places,--leading you over
logs and through brush, alert and expectant, till, suddenly, she bursts
up a few yards from you, and goes humming through the trees,--the
complete triumph of endurance and vigor. Hardy native bird, may your
tracks never be fewer, or your visits to the birch-tree less frequent!

The squirrel tracks--sharp, nervous, and wiry--have their histories
also. But how rarely we see squirrels in winter! The naturalists say
they are mostly torpid; yet evidently that little pocket-faced
depredator, the chipmunk, was not carrying buckwheat for so many days
to his hole for nothing: was he anticipating a state of torpidity, or
providing against the demands of a very active appetite? Red and gray
squirrels are more or less active all winter, though very shy, and, I
am inclined to think, partially nocturnal in their habits. Here a gray
one has just passed,--came down that tree and went up this; there he
dug for a beechnut, and left the burr on the snow. How did he know
where to dig? During an unusually severe winter I have known him to
make long journeys to a barn, in a remote field, where wheat was
stored. How did he know there was wheat there? In attempting to return,
the adventurous creature was frequently run down and caught in the deep
snow.

His home is in the trunk of some old birch or maple, with an entrance
far up amid the branches. In the spring he builds himself a
summer-house of small leafy twigs in the top of a neighboring beech,
where the young are reared and much of the time is passed. But the
safer retreat in the maple is not abandoned, and both old and young
resort thither in the fall, or when danger threatens. Whether this
temporary residence amid the branches is for elegance or pleasure, or
for sanitary reasons or domestic convenience, the naturalist has