But he did not believe her and said, "Oh, I have gathered all the nuts I shall want and am not going to work any more," and then he would go to sleep again.
Weeks passed by, and it grew colder and colder and the snow came, and all the squirrels began to draw on their stores of nuts. Lazy found that he got pretty hungry sometimes and that the habit of eating and drinking all he wanted in the summer made him want to eat and drink all he wanted in the winter. And as he had never taught himself self-denial, he ate all he wanted, and very early in the winter he began to see that the nuts he had gathered would not last him half-way through the winter, and almost before he knew it his whole store was exhausted and he had nothing to eat.
Then he asked his mother to let him have some of the nuts that she had gathered, and being a kind mother, she let him have just as many as she could, but she still had to keep some for his sick brothers. When she would not give him all he thought he ought to have he decided that he would go over to a neighboring tree and ask a squirrel over there for some of his nuts, and for weeks he went from one tree to another begging nuts, until every squirrel in the woods hated to see him coming, for they knew he was going to beg food that he should have gathered for himself.
At last he became so much of a nuisance that all the squirrels in the wood held a meeting and decided that each one of them would give two nuts to "Lazy," as they now all called him, and that he would have to live for the rest of the winter on the store they contributed or else starve.
When Lazy saw what a small store of nuts he would have to live upon until spring he was frightened, for he had eaten almost as many nuts as there were there in a week.
But he knew he had to make them last, so he ate very sparingly, and his sides began to be less plump and his cheeks less full, and by springtime he was a pretty sorry-looking squirrel, with his ribs showing plainly through his sides and his bushy tail looking bigger than the whole of the rest of him.
But it taught him a good lesson, and early in the next summer, just as soon as there were any nuts to be had, he began to store them away, and when winter came again he had a big hole in the tree filled full and his mother was much pleased.
"You see," she told him, "how wicked it is not to provide for the future and store up things that are necessary against the time when you will need them."
And Lazy agreed with her and told her that never again so long as he lived would he merit the name of "Lazy."
