THE SQUIRREL.
[To THE BDITOE OP THE " SPECTATOR:9
you allow me to render thanks to my old friend Sir Edmund Monson for his kindly word for the squirrels, in -the place where it was spoken? In my own boyhood I captured, running him down in a fair race in the woods, a young grey squirrel, and found him as Sir Edmund says of his, the most delightful and least troublesome of pets ; never kept in confinement and always as fond of me as a dog, but I think less intelligent and less active than my Swiss pet, Billy.' I have written for the Century Magazine the history of 'Billy' and his companion Hans,' and I will not here anticipate what I have there said ; but Sir Edmund's sympathy with my love of the sciurian, be his species what it may, encourages me to hope that that little history, when read, may make friends in England, I wish I could hope also in Germany. for the roulgaris, which in England only needs to be protected from brutality to become as much an ornament to our daily lives as our caged birds or our pet dogs. One lady tells me that her gardener will shoot them because they come and steal strawberries in the garden, another that they nibble the fruit, and another still that they do in the Swiss pine forests, and I hear also in Scotland, eat the twigs of trees. The Germans pretend that they eat off the top twigs, which checks the upward growth of the tree ; but this I deny, though it is certain that when they are famished they will eat young twigs, but as the top twig is the most difficult to reach, and is no better than the lower twigs as food, there is no reason for their eating the top twig, nor have I ever found a tree so attacked. The eating of the lower branches acts like any other form of pruning, in favour of the upper growth; but in any case, what a brutal pretext for the destruction of one of the most beautiful and gentlest of living creatures, that in their winter hunger they should browse on the trees in which their Creator, and ours, has made their homes ! You have laws to protect the singing birds, why should they not be extended to the little creature which adds as much to the beauty of your forest land as the birds to their music ? Any human being who has been so fortunate as to have enlisted the love, and awakened the intellect of these little quadrupeds, will hence- forward, like Sir Edmund, regard sciuricide as only some grades lower in the scale of wickedness than homicide, but no less to be abhorred.
Your careless readers will question the soundness of my mental state when I say that I learned of my squirrels lessons of love to all living creatures, such as a varied and dramatic experience of humanity had never taught me, and which make it impossible for me even now, though I am an old man, to tell of their lovely lives with dry eyes (for they are both dead); and if I mistake not, the testimony of "H. C. B." would agree with mine, though her little pet is still living and loving. I think she advises no one to keep squirrels, more in the interest of the prisoner than the keeper, and because their imprisonment is generally irksome to them ; but when taken young and left always free in the room, they domesticate perfectly, and if given in their quarters some old books or papers and bits of cloth to line their nests with, they harm nothing, and after a little, finding that their nests are pro- vided for, they lose the desire, with the need, of collecting. If one can get a young squirrel, and treat it in this way, instead of keeping it in a cage to find its only active life in turning a tread-mill, I think that any love that may be bestowed on it would be put out at large interest, and benefit the keeper, if not the squirrel.
In the New York Nation, which reaches me to-day, there occurs a passage in a letter describing the Jain Animal Hospital at Ahmedabad, which I will quote to show how much we might benefit by intercourse with some of those we call heathen. "Recently I stood by the Three Gates, and saw a group of water-carrier women pass through the court that connects the three massive gateways. There is a tree here, the home of squirrels. Not one of these common working-women, and they did not even belong to the Jain sect, failed to pause for a moment and fling a handful of grain to the expectant little beasts. It may have been all their religion, but it was good to see. The Jains themselves do not believe in God, but they have a very practical religion. It is a pity that it cannot be introduced among the nations of the West, as a sort of subsidiary cult."
In the Central Park of New York the American grey squirrel is acclimatised, and there was a poor girl, homeless and depending on chance for her bread, who so interested herself in the squirrels and the squirrels in her, that she had to be arrested and sent to the workhouse for going, by day or night, to the park to feed them, and they swarmed all over her to search her pockets for the scraps of food she brought. The police locked her up in the workhouse as a vagabond. I would rather be that poor girl in the Last Day than the owner of the richest house on the Central Park. Poor little Jain, with a heart so large as to take the innocent creatures of the wood into it, sent to misery, maybe to woman's worst degradation, for want of one friend. What sort of "sub- sidiary cult" would Jainism be to that of the owners of the land about the Central Park ? Would not the tail wag the dog F—I am, Sir, &c.,
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