Page:The clerk of the woods.djvu/280

262 course, so as always to alight head uppermost against the bole.

It would be fun to see such a carnival as Audubon describes, when two hundred or more of the squirrels were at play in the evening, near Philadelphia, running up the trees and sailing away, like boys at the old game of "swinging off birches." "Scores of them," he says, "would leave each tree at the same moment, and cross each other, gliding like spirits through the air, seeming to have no other object in view than to indulge a playful propensity."

Compared with that, mine was a small show; but it was so much better than nothing.

Two mornings later (April 30) I was walking up the main street of our village, lounging along, waiting for an electric car to overtake me, when I heard loud batrachian voices from a field on my left hand. "Aha!" said I, "the spade-foots are out again." It had occurred to me within a day or two that this should be their season, if, as is believed, their appearance above ground is conditioned upon an unusual rainfall.