To return, however, to this particular morning, she came in and out several times till the nuts were finished, and then took a bit of brown bread in her mouth, and hid it in the curtains before she finally departed. Afterwards I saw her in the lime tree licking her little paws, and cleaning her whiskers assiduously.
“There’s a boy downstairs with some baby squirrels in his pocket, and he says will you buy one, and he has sold the others already, and will you tell him how to feed them?”
This from an excited child who came bounding to my door, the morning holidays began, and we were all going away from home.
I went downstairs and found a bright-eyed, sturdy little chap of nine, who held in his hand a tiny bit of fur, with a fuzzy turned-up tail, and a pair of sharp tufted ears. Putting it on the kitchen table—where it darted about in electric fashion, saved from falling off the edge every minute by eager hands—the boy pulled another, and another, and yet another out of his pockets, and then diving into a basket on the floor, he produced three more. Seven furry infants! I gasped. The heartlessness of it! What were the bereaved and distracted parents doing?
I questioned him wrathfully, as I dashed round the table, with others, to prevent imminent catastrophes. The electric movements spread all over the broad surface of the kitchen table.
“Where did you get them?”
“Out in the fir plantations on the heath, Miss. Oi cloimed up a tree and put me ’and in the nestises. Oi let one fall, and ’e doid.”