a few days old the mother will take them on a trip to the feeding ground. I believe that the white tail acts as a signal to the young after night and is also a beauty attraction in courtship. They are lovers of the night and many a time you can see them playing about the yard in the clear moonlight.

While on a tramp in the woods one evening in June I noticed a rabbit perhaps three hundred feet away. I stood perfectly still, and his sense of inquisitiveness getting the better of him, he came up close to investigate me. He shook his nose and rubbed it with a forepaw, as though it itched. The olfactory nerve is placed high up in the rabbit's nose. But his sense of hearing is his principal one, and he depends mainly on his long ears to warn him of danger. His sight is very good; better after night than in the day time. His sense of smell seems to be delicate too. This fellow tasted a white clover stalk, but it was not to his liking. He shook his nose, gave me a sly wink from his big eyes, then hopped down the road around the fence to a big patch of nettles where was his favorite retreat.

How the rabbit will thump the ground with his forepaws when he is mad, or desires to frighten an intruder away! I like to hear him give this warning. It is also a fighting signal between two males. And what battles they will wage against each other! They can strike an extremely hard blow with those long black legs of theirs. Why they will not bite when caught has always been a mystery to me. Probably it is because of their extreme timidity.

Nearly every flesh eating animal and bird of prey kills them. And men who call themselves hunters will use a ferret and take from twenty to a hundred rabbits in a day. Often have I wondered that any remain to tempt men's greed. Hunting with a ferret ought not to be allowed. There should be a fine provided heavy enough to put an end to it.

THE WOODCHUCK.

Sitting in front of his burrow on his hind feet the woodchuck assumes a very comic attitude. Where he can locate his burrow under a stump it is his delight to get on the top of the stump and make) observations of the surrounding country, to see if all is safe.

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for him to venture out for his daily feed of clover or other tender plants. When he runs he has a lumbersome gait, but he can get over the ground quite rapidly.

His tracks can easily be mistaken for those of a coon, but there is a big difference, for the coon has five digits on each foot, while the woodchuck has four in front and five behind. Several years ago I helped track what a partner of mine thought was positively a coon. As the tracks were nearly snowed shut we could not tell for sure whether they were coon tracks, but whether coon or woodchuck we decided to dig him out. He was a woodchuck, lean and lank, awakened from his sleep a little too early, perhaps. It was the latter part of February and cold.. Probably he had become hungry, though he had a supply of grass in the hole. Young woodchucks the size of kittens are very pretty little play fellows, and many are their antics. They will play outside the burrow a game of hide and seek, and roll and tumble over each other, but the least noise will send them scurrying into the burrow. The woodchuck is possessed of an engineer's knowledge. He will drive a tunnel for quite a distance under the ground and allow it to come to the surface or go where he does not want it to go. He will dig branches off to the side to slip into when pursued and will dip them downward so that if any water runs in it will not make his nest wet. The forefeet are used to dig the dirt loose and the hind feet work it back and clean out of the hole. How he can run his burrows so mathematically correct is a mystery to me. He will dig straight down for many feet, turn in some direction and come back again directly beneath the first hole, so that when you dig out his burrow you will cover this latter up and find him not. With a good dog his strategy avails him nothing.

Last spring one of our neighbors started to make maple syrup and had his camp all rigged up ready for the sap to run. When he started a fire he wondered why it would not burn. He began poking it and shortly out came a woodchuck sneezing and coughing. His grizzled hair was singed and he was a pitiable looking fellow, as he sat in a corner wondering what had happened to him.

The woodchuck loves nothing better, to put on fat for his winter's hibernation, than a good red clover field. He goes to

sleep in October, or later if warm weather continues. The spring awakening starts him hunting in the clover fields for the tender newly starting plants, impelled by a mighty hunger from his long fast.

Usually in January or February you will find where he has been out tramping. In the winter of 1912 few stirred from their warm burrows.

One day in June, 1911, my nephew and I, while fishing at Cedar Lake, saw some animal start from the shore and swim out into the lake. Rowing over to where it was we found it to be a big woodchuck. He swam like a veteran for the other shore, but when he saw us turned around and swam back again. The lake was quite rough and he was out some three hundred feet from the shore. He seemed quite at home in the water.

Woodchucks do considerable damage to clover fields by eating off the clover heads and making holes for the horses to step into. I believe there will come a time when they will be eaten as readily as are rabbits. The smell of the fat of them is disgusting to many people, however.

THE FLYING SQUIRREL.

No prettier creature is to be found in the woodland than the little flying squirrel. Only rarely seen in the daytime his presence is not then suspected, but in the twilight or early morning he can be seen climbing around a dead snag, or he will climb high up on some tree, make a leap outward, and go sailing through the air to the bottom of another tree near by.

They hibernate early, but do not sleep soundly, for they are out once in a while during the winter. They store up nuts and other food to eat between cold snaps. A beech tree my father cut down was hollow in the top, and in this hollow there were about a dozen of them. He brought several to the house. In the day time they would cling up under the stairway of the old log house and sleep, but during the night they roamed around and made so much noise that finally they were taken back to a hollow tree in the woods. I put some nuts on a stump for them but I guess the nuts made a feast for the red squirrels.