“Oh, nothing definite. They’re just talking of what they’ll do if you tease their young ones this year, as you did last year. You remember they got very angry with you before the nesting season was over.”
He began to hum his favorite song—“I care for nobody; no, not I—”
“Squirrie,” I said pleadingly, “if you only knew how much pleasanter it is to be good and have everybody love you.”
“Just like you—little sneaking soft-face!” he said.
I was quite shocked. “I am not a sneak,” I said, “and why do you call me soft-face—I, a hard-billed bird?”
“You’re such a little drooling darling,” he said disdainfully, “making up to all the birds in the neighborhood, and pretending to be such an angel. You’re a little weasel, that’s what you are.”
“A weasel,” I exclaimed in horror, “a bad
animal that sucks birds’ blood. Squirrie, you’re crazy!”
“I’m not crazy,” he said, coming quite out of the hole and sitting up on his hind legs and shaking his forepaws threateningly at me. “I see through you, Mr. Snake-in-the-grass.”
I was silent for a minute under this torrent of abuse and overwhelmed at his audacity in calling me, a tiny bird, by the names of bad animals—not that snakes are all bad, nor are weasels, but he used the bad part of them to describe me.