"My poor child," said her mother, "if you will only try, so that I can see you trying, my confidence in you will come back, but not otherwise. I want something more than empty promises. You forget them as soon as you make them."
"But I will try, I will really try this time," said Bessie with tears in her eyes. "I'm lazy, mother, I'm real lazy, but I am not as bad as I might be. I'll clean the drawer just as soon as we look for the nest, sure."
"Well," said her mother, half smiling at the little girl's doleful tone, "well, I will give you this one more chance. We will take the drawer for a new starting point. Come, Nelly, let us search now for the squirrel's hole. It must be somewhere about here, for it would never come up by the stairs, I think."
They began a thorough hunt, lifting up every light article in the out-garret, where they were, and dragging the more ponderous furniture from their places. It was a sort of store-away place for things not in every-day use, and therefore it took some time to examine every thing. An occasional pile of nibbled nut-shells was all that was brought to light.
"Well," said Nelly, laughing, as she looked under the last article, a little broken chair belonging to Bessie. "Well, I don't see but that Madame Squirrel has escaped us. I can't meet with a trace of her, for my part, beyond these nut-shells."
"Nor I either," wofully added Bessie.
"Yet how could it have run away from us, since we can find no hole in the floor, and Nelly did not see it run into any of these other rooms?" asked Bessie's mother.
"Perhaps it is hidden in the furniture itself," remarked Nelly.
"Stop a moment," said Bessie's mother, as Nelly began to pull out the drawers of an old bureau, "here are some crossbeams in the wall by the fire-board, that look very much as though a set of sharp teeth had nibbled a hole in them,—yes, it is so! Well, I think we've tracked the squirrel now! The place is such a little way from the floor, that it could jump in and scamper off through the walls, before any one could molest it. Perhaps it is far away in the woods, laughing at us, at this minute."