‘What a sell for them when they find no one at home!’ I whispered in his ear. But Rusty only grunted, and a sharp signal for silence came from father. The bough which had been broken before stopped the climber for a few moments, but presently he managed to swarm up the trunk and seat himself astride of the very branch upon which our former home was founded. They shouted to him from below to be careful. The fellow in the tree paid no heed, but, clutching the trunk with one hand to steady himself, boldly thrust the other into the nest. There was a sharp exclamation of disgust; and he cried out furiously that there was nothing there. They were all in great excitement, and kept urging him to look further and to make sure we weren’t hiding. He felt in every crevice of the nest, and peered about in the boughs, and then, having evidently made up his mind we had really gone, prepared to descend. But the others called to him to look again, so, steadying himself once more upon the bough, he peered upward. Then he solemnly declared, shaking his head, that there was nothing in the tree. To prove it, with a sweep of his great red paw, he carelessly ripped our old home from its perch and sent it tumbling to the ground. I heard mother give a little gasp as she saw destroyed in an instant the results of so many hours of careful and loving toil; but my own thoughts and eyes were so concentrated upon the invader of our rightful domain that I am afraid I hardly considered her injured feelings. Still they would not allow him to come down; and now came in a very real danger. From the ground it would have been quite impossible for them to spy us out in our new quarters, but up the tree this fellow was on a level with us, and had only to get a clear look between the boughs to spy our little red bodies, which, however much we crouched together, made a considerable ball of fur. Climbing to his feet, he stood upright on the bough, clinging with one arm to the trunk. It was this movement which proved our undoing. Standing thus, his head was clear of the dwindling foliage near the spire-like summit of the larch, and from his lofty perch his eye commanded the tree-tops in the neighbourhood. A moment later his gaze fell upon us, five small scared balls of red fur, and his roar of triumph struck terror to our quaking hearts. Without paying the slightest attention to the shouted questions of his friends below, he swung himself down hand over hand, and in a very short time had dropped to the ground, and was running across towards our fir-tree, with the others yelping at his heels like a pack of harriers after a hare. Mother and father exchanged a few hurried words, but what they said I in my excitement had not the faintest idea. Next moment father had me by the scruff of the neck, and darted away up into the thick and almost impenetrable top of the giant fir. Mother, with Hazel between her teeth, came after him like a flash.