relative? This quality gives the name to the fungus. The blushing agaric is perfectly wholesome. You remember how often we had it cooked last autumn, and how delicious it was both for breakfast and dinner. I would never, however, advise persons who have not paid attention to the study of fungi to gather and eat them without asking the opinion of some one who had knowledge of the subject; and I am sure that you, children, will never think of eating any kind that you have not first brought to me. There sits the squirrel. Let us make him show us how he can leap from one bough to another. I clap my hands and Jack throws a stone, and off the little fellow goes, taking wonderful leaps. As the winter approaches the squirrel will be busy laying up stores for consumption during that season, such as nuts, acorns, and beech-mast. For the greater part of the winter the squirrel is dormant; on fine warm days, however, he ventures out of his retreat in the hole of a tree, visits his cupboard, cracks a few nuts, and then goes to sleep again. The nest of the squirrel is made of moss, leaves, and twigs curiously intertwined, and is generally placed between the forked branches; the young ones, two or three in number, are born in the month of June. A gentleman, in a letter to Mr. Jenyns, says "a pair which frequented a tree opposite the window of one of the rooms, evinced great enmity to a couple of magpies with whom they kept up a perpetual warfare, pursuing them from branch to branch, and from tree to tree with untiring agility. Whether this persecution arose from natural antipathy between the combatants, or from jealousy of interference with their nests, is not known."