Did you ever know a squirrel? I did, only last summer. We didn't get on well together at first. His cage stood in the open parlor window, just outside of which I would lie, lazily swinging in a hammock behind drooping vines, with an old garden of box and hollyhocks and ascension lilies in the foreground, and just beyond, the gleaming sea. It was all perfect but —that squirrel. Peace and radiance and fragrance on one side; a whirl and a rattling and a crackling on the other. Round and round and round, that squirrel would go in his wheel, looking like nothing but one whirling ring of squirrel and squirrel tail. He was the "one blot on the summer morn."
I grew to feel a most unchristian animosity towards him. One leg of his cage was a little shorter than the others, and as the wheel went round, thump, thump, thump went the cage. How could one compose one's mind to think and write of peace and harmony and pleasant things, with all the rattle and whirr of that crunching, scampering squirrel?
So one day, after trying vainly to write, I tied up the wheel. Oh, what a mad squirrel! He tried the usual means of making the wheel go; but it would not go, for some mysterious cause, which he proceeded at once to investigate. He looked up and down and around: he discovered the secondary cause, the tying. He looked outside and recognized the primary cause, Me, and a very mortal squirrel stood revealed;—a vindictive little paw thrust itself quickly through the wires and scratched my hand.
