But I was talking about the good times we had that autumn and the various delicacies we used to hunt. After the rain which brought such a crop of mushrooms, we had a week of wonderfully warm, soft, hazy weather, but then the wind switched round into the east, and for the first time in my life I understood what cold was. It blew bitterly, with a hard grey sky, and the trees being still full of leaves, the noise of the gale through the coppice was one long roar, the great boughs swaying, creaking, and complaining bitterly. Very glad we were, when night fell, to snuggle all four close together in the hollow in the beech hole which mother had selected as our abode after the destruction of our second nest! It was a very convenient residence, considering that it was a ready-made one. Some winter storm of years long past had torn away a large branch at its junction with the trunk, and rain and weather had rotted the scar till at last a hollow was left large enough to hold a dozen of us. Once it had been full of water, but a green woodpecker boring its nest in the trunk below, the moisture had drained away through the rotten fibres, and now it was dry as a bone, and formed as convenient and comfortable a retreat as any dreyless family of squirrels could possibly desire. The gale lasted two whole days and nights, and then it cleared and left a hard blue sky from which the small white flecks of wind-cloud vanished one by one, and on the fourth morning we woke to find the grass white with hoar frost and a keen tang in the air which filled us with a wild delight in the mere fact of being alive. Rusty, Hazel and I sallied forth and tore round and round like three mad things, flinging ourselves from bough to bough, rattling up and down the huge trunk and wide-spreading branches, playing all manner of practical jokes on one another. Mother watched us indulgently, but when, quite out of breath, we at last came back to her, she announced that the time had arrived to begin the collection of our winter stores. ‘Now that you have no father,’ she said, ‘you must help me in the work, for remember there is nothing worse than to be caught by bad weather unprepared, and without many stores of food.’