_in_ the wood in order to seed it, but if a few stand within twenty or
thirty rods of it, it is sufficient.

I think that I may venture to say that every white-pine cone that falls to
the earth naturally in this town, before opening and losing its seeds, and
almost every pitch-pine one that falls at all, is cut off by a squirrel,
and they begin to pluck them long before they are ripe, so that when the
crop of white-pine cones is a small one, as it commonly is, they cut off
thus almost every one of these before it fairly ripens. I think, moreover,
that their design, if I may so speak, in cutting them off green, is,
partly, to prevent their opening and losing their seeds, for these are the
ones for which they dig through the snow, and the only white-pine cones
which contain anything then. I have counted in one heap, within a diameter
of four feet, the cores of 239 pitch-pine cones which had been cut off and
stripped by the red squirrel the previous winter.

The nuts thus left on the surface, or buried just beneath it, are placed
in the most favorable circumstances for germinating. I have sometimes
wondered how those which merely fell on the surface of the earth got
planted; but, by the end of December, I find the chestnut of the same year
partially mixed with the mould, as it were, under the decaying and mouldy
leaves, where there is all the moisture and manure they want, for the nuts
fall first. In a plentiful year, a large proportion of the nuts are thus
covered loosely an inch deep, and are, of course, somewhat concealed from
squirrels. One winter, when the crop had been abundant, I got, with the
aid of a rake, many quarts of these nuts as late as the tenth of January,
and though some bought at the store the same day were more than half of
them mouldy, I did not find a single mouldy one among these which I picked
from under the wet and mouldy leaves, where they had been snowed on once
or twice. Nature knows how to pack them best. They were still plump and