To Nature man is just as precious as a woodchuck or a sparrow, but not more. She cares for the woodchuck as long as he behaves like a woodchuck; so she cares for the sparrow, the oyster, the orchid, and for man. But he must behave like a natural man, must live where she intended him to live, and at the approach of winter he must neither hibernate nor migrate, for he is what the naturalists call a “winter resident.” It is not in his nature to fly away nor to go to sleep, but, like the red squirrel and the muskrat, to prepare to live up all the winter. So his original, unperverted animal instinct leads him to store. Long ago he buried his provisions in pits and hung them up on poles. Even his vocabulary he gathered together as his word-hoard. He is still possessed of the remnant of the instinct; he will still store. Cage him in a city, give him more than he needs for winter, relieve him of all possibility of want, and yet he will store. You cannot cage an instinct nor eradicate it. It will be obeyed, if all that can be found in the way of pit and pole be a grated vault in the deep recesses of some city bank. Cage a red squirrel and he will store in the cage; so will the white-footed mouse. Give the mouse more than he can use, put him in a cellar, where there is enough already stored for a city of mice, and he will take from your piles and make piles of his own. He must store or be unhappy and undone. A white-footed mouse got into my cellar last winter and found it, like the cellar of the country mouse in the fable,— Full benely stuffit, baith but and ben, Of beirris and nuttis, peis, ry and quheit— all of it, ready stored, so that, Quhen ever scho list scho had aneuch to eit. Enough to eat? Certainly; but is enough to eat all that a mouse wants? So far from being satisfied with mere meat was this particular mouse, that finding herself in the cellar in the midst of plenty, she at once began to carry my winter stores from where I had put them, and to make little heaps for herself in every dark cranny and corner of the cellar. A pint, or less, of “nuttis”—shagbarks—she tucked away in the toe of my hunting boot. The nuts had been left in a basket in the vegetable cellar; the boots stood out by the chimney in the furnace room, and there were double doors and a brick partition wall between. No matter. Here were the nuts she had not yet stored, and out yonder was the hole, smooth and deep and dark, to store them in. She found a way past the partition wall.