Just then in came the two boys together.
HE IMITATED ME TO MY FACE
‘Hulloa!’ cried Harry, ‘Lops is awake. Bring Nipper to have a look at him, Jack.’
Jack took me out of my cage, and I jumped as usual on to his shoulder and nibbled his ear by way of a kiss. He walked across to the other cage and set me down in front of it.
‘Mr. Lops,’ he said with mock gravity, ‘allow me to introduce Mr. Nipper. This is a small cousin of yours, Nipper, and he comes from Mexico. As you see yourself, he’s a sad character—sleeps all day and only wakes up at night.’
I was so lost in surprise that I sat quite still, gazing through the fine wire mesh at my new acquaintance. I have always had a fairly good opinion of my own looks, as every well-bred squirrel should have, but, upon my word, he put me out of all conceit with myself. He was the tiniest, daintiest, quaintest creature I ever set eyes on. No bright red about him, but though his coat was darker and greyer than mine, it was as soft as fine velvet, and beautifully groomed. His head was perfectly shaped, his ears pricked like my own, and his eyes very large and amazingly bright. But the oddest thing about him were the folds of loose skin which extended in a thin membrane from all his four legs back to his body. When he jumped from the upper, story of his cage to the lower, they spread out almost like the wings of a bat; but when he was sitting still, they folded up so that they did not in the least spoil his beautiful shape. I must say that I felt quite envious, for I thoroughly understood that a squirrel built like that could jump ever so much further than I or any of my family could. We English squirrels can, at a pinch, clear as much as three yards in a straight line. We always spread our legs wide when we jump as well as keeping our tails stretched straight out, and that is why we can leap from great heights and reach the ground unhurt, for we drop parachute fashion. But as for these American cousins of ours, the flying squirrels, they can jump from the top of one tree, and sliding through the air like a soaring hawk, reach another tree fifty feet or more away at a height from the ground only slightly less than that of their starting-point.
Lops—which Jack said was short for Nyctalops, or ‘seer by night’—and I had many a chat afterwards. He told me of his old home in sunny Mexico, not a nest such as I was born in, but a cavity in the trunk of a vast live oak or ilex, from whose boughs long weepers of grey Spanish moss trailed towards the brown palmetto-stained water below; of the hot sun and of the furious tropical storms which lashed the deep river into white foam; of the paroquets, with their brilliant plumage of green and red and blue, which screamed harshly among the upper branches at dawn; of the rusty-hued water-vipers which coiled sluggishly on the steaming mud in summer. He told, too, of the perils from great hawks three times as large as any we know in England, from long, thin tree-snakes wrapped unseen round the branches; and I shuddered when he talked of fierce wild-cats as much at home among the tree-tops as on the ground. It must have been a wonderful country and a wonderful life, so different from our northern island as to be almost beyond my imagination to picture it. All day the land slept breathless beneath the blazing sun, with nothing moving except the birds, the fox-squirrels, and the lizards; and during those hours Lops and his family slept in the dark recesses of their wood-walled fortress; but when the sun set the forest woke to life. Deer came down to the river to drink; peccaries rooted in droves among the bases of the mighty trees; sometimes a great bear came prowling along, uttering now and then a deep ‘woof’ when any unaccustomed sound disturbed him. Up above opossums and racoons moved silently to and fro among the tree-tops; great owls whirled on soft wings, hooting dismally; while all night long—especially in the hot season—the endless chirr of crickets, the pipe of tree-frogs and the deep booming of bull-frogs filled the air with a never-ending concert. Other sounds there were, rarer, but far more terrifying. Enormous bull-alligators, floating like logs with only their gnarled heads and the ridges of their rugged backs above the water, would bellow with a roar that shook the forest; or, again, from some hidden recess of the deepest woods the blood-curdling shriek of the tawny puma would ring hideously through the night.
Poor Lops! Though cared for as few pets are—fed with dainty pecan-nuts and other delicacies from his far-off home across the ocean, and though he loved his mistress Mabel, Jack’s sister, devotedly—yet he was never happy as I was. The damp and cold of our climate oppressed him, and most of his time he spent curled up tightly among the soft bedding of his cage. Then, too, he was a creature of the night, and it was only after dark that he would wake and want to play—and at that time, except for an hour or two, there was no one to play with. I felt very sorry for him, and so, too, were Mabel and the boys. I am sure that if they could they would have set him free again among the great tropical forests that he loved so well, and always mourned for, though only I knew how deeply.