A SQUIRREL AND CAT STORY.
['To THE EDITOR OF THE "SPECTATOR."' SIR,—Can you find room for one more squirrel-cat story, an old story as to date, but at the same time new (in print) and quite true ? Twenty years ago last May, I and my three schoolboys were picnicking in a glade of a fir-forest above the Lae Leman. The short turf was covered with a carpet of cowslips and spring gentians. The scene was a paradise. "Hi ! there's a magpie's nest. I'll have one of the young ones," and with that my son swarmed up the tall straight trunk of one of the fir-trees to where on the first fork rested a loose jumble of crossed sticks. "It's not a magpie," he called, and. we Saw him carefully wrapping something out of the nest in his pocket-handkerchief; and tying it into a little bundle he "swarmed down again. The handkerchief contained .a tiny grey squirrel of the sort which one sees, mixed with the English sort, hanging in Swiss markets in pitiful bunches, and destined to fill pies. This one was the size of a large mouse, blind, its tail bare of hair, not pretty in any wise. "Oh, what a pity. We can never feed it," said I. "Oh, let's try," said the boys. So we adjourned to a wayside cabaret and ordered cafe-au-lait entirely for the squirrel's sake, and delightedly saw it eagerly sack down drops of warm milk. But what to do with it finally ? I had a happy thought. We carried it up to the mansarde in the high roof of our ancient pension, and laid it before the cat (a very common "tortoiseshell "), who was then nursing a kitten of the squirrel's age. "She will kill it !" cried my boys. But no; pussy gave it one eager glance, and then at once proceeded to lick it carefully all over, after which she placed it beside her other nursling and purred placidly while she fed the two. Many a visit was paid to that niansarde by schoolboys and their friends, old and young, while we watched our squirrel grow and develop,—his black eyes open, his rat's-tail become a beautiful brush, his movements grow rapid and bird-like, and evidently an enigma and a trial to his foster-mother. One day we found her alone and waiting at the open window. He was her favourite child, and she had neglected the kitten for him. He was soon discovered skipping nimbly about the steep roof, whence pussy succeeded in tempting him back to his bed. Two or three weeks later we saw a weird sight,—the uncanny pair, mother and son, slowly descending the broad stairway of the old campagne side by side, she with the proud air of a chaperon introducing a distinguished debutante. She led him to the garden and then left him. We never caged him. He lived a merry life, chiefly in a tall tulip-tree close to the house, but he roamed freely even down to the lakeside. Ho knew our hours, and never failed to drop down among us at our "al-fresco" tea, when he would rush impatiently at the ladies' pockets, where we hid things to tease him, and barked at us like a small terrier if we hindered him. But he was at his sweetest when he visited me and mine severally very early in the morning before we were up. Coming in through open windows, we always had dainties for him hidden under the pillow, and he would sit up on the bed in front of us and eat them, nuts or little fancy biscuits, slaking his thirst from a tumbler of water. He always came leaping to me, even from the ends of the plantation, if I called " Rom ! Rom ! " We named him Romulus,' as nursed by a wild beast. He did not like to be caught and held, though he loved to be stroked and played with. He never bit. He would bounce on to my shoulder off a high tree and nibble my hair. We had suspected him of secreting more than he could possibly eat, biscuits and nuts, when we at last discovered his secret larder in a hollow tree in the plantation, his biscuits all wretchedly soft and soppy ; and we also found him holding in his tiny bands and biting an immense tree-fungus, like a great sea- biscuit, which almost overbalanced him. To end my too long story, in November of the same year, alas ! our pet dis- appeared, came no longer at my call, leaping through the
Previous page
