Squill, s. A plant; a fish; an insect.
Squirrel, s. A small animal that lives in woods, leaping from tree to tree.
Within the memory of some of the old persons residing in Richmond Park, squirrels were in such vast numbers, that parties of fifty or sixty persons have come from the metropolis and its neighbourhood, for the purpose of killing them. They were furnished with short sticks, with lead at one end, with which they knocked the animals down. These squirrel hunts occasioned many fights with the keepers, in one of which a keeper, of the name of Bishop, was nearly killed. The squirrels were in consequence destroyed, and it is now but seldom that one is seen.
Cat and Squirrels.—A boy has taken three little young squirrels in their nest, or drey as it is called in these parts. These small creatures he put under the care of a cat who had lately lost her kittens, and finds that she nurses and suckles them with the same assiduity and affection as if they were her own offspring. This circumstance corroborates my suspicion, that the mention of exposed and deserted children being nurtured by female breasts of prey who had lost their young, may not be so improbable an incident as many have supposed; and therefore may be a justification of those authors who have gravely mentioned what some have deemed to be a wild and improbable story.
So many persons went to see the little squirrels suckled by a cat, that the foster mother became jealous of her charge, and in pain for their safety; and therefore hid them over the ceiling, where one died. This circumstance shows her affection for these fondlings, and that she supposes the squirrels to be her own young. Thus hens, when they have hatched ducklings, are equally attached to them as if they were their own chickens.
The squirrel’s nest is not only called a drey in Hampshire, but also in other counties; in Suffolk it is called a bay. The word “drey,” though now provincial, I have met with in some of our old writers.
In the north of Hampshire a great portion of the squirrels have white tails. None of this variety, as far as I can learn, reach the London Market. I was much surprised at hearing from a man who kept a bird and cage shop in London, that not less than twenty thousand squirrels are annually sold there for the menus plaisirs of cockneys, part of which come from France, but the greater number are brought in by labourers to Newgate and Leadenhall markets, where any morning during the season four or five hundred might be bought. He said that he himself sold annually about seven hundred: and, he added, that about once in seven years the breed of squirrels entirely fails, but that in other seasons they are equally prolific. The subject was introduced by his answering to a woman who came in to buy a squirrel, that he had not had one that season, but before that time in the last season he had sold five hundred. It appears that the mere manufacture of squirrel cages for Londoners is no small concern.—Mitford—White.
Stable, a. Fixed, steady.