It was one day in April that our four babies were born. Ugly little beasts, I called them, quite hairless, blind and helpless. But when I ventured to remark as much to my wife there was a regular upset. You might hardly believe it, but she turned me out neck and crop, and for the next few days I never ventured home for more than a few minutes at a time. It was difficult even to persuade Sable to leave the little beggars long enough to take her meals. Early spring is none too easy a time for squirrels to find food in any case, and we were forced to subsist principally on the young shoots and bark of pine and fir trees. It is this habit which gets us such a bad name with keepers and foresters, but we do not do half so much damage as we are credited with. One day, when I was out alone foraging, I met Rusty looking very fat and happy. ‘Hulloa, Scud,’ he said. ‘You’re getting thin. Cares of matrimony, eh?’ ‘They don’t appear to worry you very much, anyhow,’ I retorted. ‘How do you keep so fat?’ ‘Oh, I find plenty of food,’ he answered lightly; but there was a sort of guilty air about him which puzzled me at the time. A day or two later, when I caught him devouring a nestful of the little blue eggs of the hedge-sparrow, I understood. Now, eating eggs is a thing which is considered by well-bred squirrels to be thoroughly bad form; but, after all, it was no business of mine. Rusty was old enough to take his own course, so I said nothing about it. I have often blamed myself since, for one bad habit leads to another; and no doubt my brother’s indulgence in eggs that spring was the first step which led to the sad end which afterwards befell him. To return to my own affairs—our kittens grew with astonishing rapidity, and once they opened their eyes began to prove decidedly more interesting. They were three bucks and a doe. In a month they were half as big as myself, and their hair had grown to quite a respectable length. Being April kittens, their coats were entirely different from the one which I had worn during my first summer. Mine had been reddish-brown, and I had had no tufts on my ears, but our young ones had greyish-brown coats like the winter one which I was just beginning to discard, and they wore smart little tufts on each ear as well as hair on their palms. One of them, however, was much darker than the other three.