The courts where Jamshyd gloried and drank deep;
And Bahrám, that great hunter—the wild ass
Stamps o’er his head, but cannot break his sleep.”
If such things have happened, if Nineveh and Babylon flourished and came to naught, why wonder at the decline and fall of Old Colony berry pastures?
SQUIRRELS, FOXES, AND OTHERS
“Do you know where there are any flying squirrels?” I asked a friend, two or three weeks ago. My friend, I should mention, is a farmer, living a mile or two away from the village, and, being much out-of-doors with his eyes open, has sometimes good things to show me. With all the rest, he has more than once taken me to a flying squirrel’s tree and given me a chance to see the creature “fly.”
This peculiar member of the squirrel family, as all readers may be presumed to know, is nocturnal in its habits, and for that reason is seldom seen by ordinary strollers. Once my friend, who was just then at work in the woods, found a hollow tree in which one was living, and we visited the spot together. I posted myself conveniently, and he went up to the tree and hammered upon it with his axe. Out peeped the squirrel at a height of perhaps twenty feet, and as the blows continued it “took wing” and came to the ground safely, and more or less gracefully, alighting at the foot of another tree some distance away. At all other times I have seen the flight from outside nests, as they may be called—bulky aggregations of leaves and twigs placed in the bare tops of moderately tall, slender trees, preferably gray-birches, and mostly in swampy woods.
On the present occasion my friend told me that he knew of no nests now in use, but that if I would come to his house the next morning he would go with me in search of some. I called for him at the hour appointed. Squirrels or no squirrels, it is always worth while to take a walk in good company.
He led me along the highway for a quarter of a mile, and then struck into a wood-road, which presently brought us into a swampy forest, with here and there a bit of pond, which we must go out of our way to cross on the ice (a light snow had covered it within twenty-four hours), on the lookout for fox tracks and what not. We were headed for the “city-house lot,” he told me.
“The city-house lot,” said I; “what is that?”