My boys have at intervals displayed a liking for natural history, and one of them during some years took to trapping small mammals, discovering species that I had no idea existed in certain places; near Washington, but on the other side of the Potomac, he trapped several of those very dainty little creatures, the harvest mice.[7] One of my other boys—the special friend of Josiah the badger—discovered a flying-squirrel’s nest, in connection with which a rather curious incident occurred. The little boy had climbed a tree which is hollow at the top; and in this hollow he discovered a flying-squirrel mother with six young ones. She seemed so tame and friendly that the little boy for a moment hardly realized that she was a wild thing, and called down that he had “found a guinea pig up the tree.” Finally, the mother made up her mind to remove her family. She took each one in turn in her mouth and flew or sailed down from the top of the tree to the foot of another tree near by; ran up this, holding the little squirrel in her mouth; and again sailed down to the foot of another tree some distance off. Here she deposited her young one on the grass, and then, reversing the process, climbed and sailed back to the tree where the nest was; then she took out another young one and returned with it, in exactly the same fashion as with the first. She repeated this until all six of the young ones were laid on the bank, side by side in a row, all with their heads the same way. Finding that she was not molested she ultimately took all six of the little fellows back to her nest, where she reared her brood undisturbed. Footnote 7: A visit of this same small boy, when eleven years old, to John Burroughs, is described by the latter in “Far and Near,” in the chapter called “Babes in the Woods.”