When alarmed or chased a squirrel always ascends the tree on the opposite side away from you--he will not run to a solitary tree if he can possibly avoid it: he likes a group, and his trick is, the moment he thinks he is out of sight among the upper branches, to slip quietly from one tree to the other till, while you are scanning every bough, he has travelled fifty yards away unnoticed. If the branches are not close enough to hide him, he gets as much as possible behind a large branch, and stretches himself along it--at the same time his tail, which at other times is bushy, seems to contract, so that he is less visible. He will leap in his alarm to dead branches, and, though his weight is trifling, occasionally they snap under the sudden impact; but that does not distress him in the least, because a bough rarely breaks clean off but hangs suspended by bark or splinters, so that he can scramble to the ivy that winds round the trunk. Or if he is obliged to slip down, the next branch catches him; and I have never seen a squirrel actually fall, though sometimes in their frightened haste they will send a number of little dead twigs rustling downwards. When the tail is spread out, so to say, its texture is so fine and silky that the light seems to play through it. They love this particular corner because just there the hedge is composed of hazel bushes, and even when the nuts are gone from the branches they still find some which have dropped upon the bank and are hidden in the dry grass and brown leaves.