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873 thief who had sinned doubly, both against them and that Providence which had shaped both their need and their supply.

Finally the old man went back to his house, and the Squirrel slipped swiftly away along the stone wall towards his secret dwelling.

When the Farmer's Wife returned, she proposed cracking some of the English walnuts. "They must be dry enough now," she said. So the old man brought down some from the garret, and fell to work. "I dun'no' as I want any," he remarked as he pounded. "I never did care much about nuts anyway, and somehow I've always felt as if we'd stole the Squirrels' after they'd worked so hard."

"How silly you be!" said his Wife, but she looked at him lovingly. "You were always too tender-hearted for your own good. Talk about stealing, it was the Squirrels that stole our nuts."

But the Squirrel and his mate, whose ancestors had held the whole land, and the fruit thereof, in feudal tenure to the Creator of it all, since the beginning of things, had different views. They were in the woods champing their supper of shagbarks, and often ﬁnding a wormy one, and they considered that the Farmer had stolen their nuts.