If the red squirrels do not have an actual game of tag, they have something so near it that I cannot tell the difference. Just now I see one in hot pursuit of another on the stone wall; both are apparently going at the top of their speed. They make a red streak over the dark-gray stones. When the pursuer seems to overtake the pursued and becomes "It," the race is reversed, and away they go on the back track with the same fleetness of the hunter and the hunted, till things are reversed again. I have seen them engaged in the same game in tree-tops, each one having his innings by turn. The gray squirrel comes and goes, but the red squirrel we have always with us. He will live where the gray will starve. He is a true American; he has nearly all the national traits--nervous energy, quickness, resourcefulness, pertness, not to say impudence and conceit. He is not altogether lovely or blameless. He makes war on the chipmunk, he is a robber of birds' nests, and is destructive of the orchard fruits. Nearly every man's hand is against him, yet he thrives, and long may he continue to do so! One day I placed some over-ripe plums on the wall in front of me to see what he would do with them. At first he fell eagerly to releasing the pit, and then to cutting his way to the kernel in the pit. After one of them had been disposed of in this way, he proceeded to carry off the others and place them here and there amid the branches of a plum-tree from which he had stolen every plum long before they were ripe. A day or two later I noted that they had all been removed from this tree, and I found some of them in the forks of an apple-tree not far off. A small butternut-tree standing near the wall had only a score or so of butternuts upon it this year; the squirrels might be seen almost any hour in the day darting about the branches of that tree, hunting the green nuts, and in early September the last nut was taken. They carried them away and placed them, one here and one there, in the forks of the apple-trees. I noticed that they did not depend upon the eye to find the nuts; they did not look the branches over from some lower branch as you and I would have done; they explored the branches one by one, running out to the end, and, if the nut was there, seized it and came swiftly down. I think the red squirrel rarely lays up any considerable store, but hides his nuts here and there in the trees and upon the ground. This habit makes him the planter of future trees, of oaks, hickories, chestnuts, and butternuts. These heavy nuts get widely scattered by this agency.