As a race, we squirrels are very conservative and home loving. So long as we are not molested, the same families and their children remain in the same wood year after year, never emigrating unless driven to do so by over-population or lack of food. If, on the other hand, the squirrels in any particular locality are regularly persecuted by man, always their worst enemy, the survivors will very soon clear out completely. There are to-day whole tracts of beautiful beech woods in Buckinghamshire, where, though food is perhaps as plentiful as anywhere else in England, yet hardly a squirrel is to be seen. Our race has been so harried that they have left altogether. Modern high preserving is what we unlucky squirrels cannot stand. Where the owner’s one idea is to get as large a head of pheasants as the coverts can possibly carry, every other woodland creature goes to the wall, and the keepers shoot us down as mercilessly as they kill kestrels, owls, jays, hedgehogs, and a dozen other harmless birds and beasts. Very soon it became clear that the new tenant of the Hall had declared war against us. The pheasants, of which an immense number had been turned down, were his only care. He used to come and strut about while Tompkins was feeding them. As Walnut said, he only needed a long tail and a few feathers to resemble exactly a stupid old, stuck-up cock-pheasant himself. Again and again during that August Tompkins with his twelve bore, and the band-box boy with a small repeating rifle, invaded the wood and fired indiscriminately at every squirrel they could set eyes on. But, as you may imagine, we very soon learnt caution, and when news of their approach was signalled from tree to tree, every squirrel in the coppice took instant cover. Still, our enemies occasionally succeeded in cutting off one of our number in some tree where total concealment was impossible, and then the cruel little brute of a boy would make him a target for his tiny bullets, often inflicting half a dozen wounds before a vital spot was struck. Then at last the tightly-clutching claws would slowly relax, and the poor, bleeding little body come thudding down from bough to bough, to be pounced on by the young murderer with a yell of fiendish glee.