dangerous thing to go far enough out on them to reach the tips. Light-weight, daring boys sometimes do this, and often fall in the attempt, as accident records show. Sometimes the squirrel falls too, though this is of comparatively rare occurrence. The wild creatures of the wood are as liable to accident as you and I, but they are not so prone to it. That severe pruning which wild life gives all who are robust enough to live it lops off all the clumsy branches of the squirrel family tree. Few but the cool-headed and skillful live to reproduce many of their kind. The boy who falls from the upper limbs of the chestnut may save his neck by catching a lower limb as he falls--I have known boys to do it. Or he may even land with no serious injury if he is fortunate enough and the distance is not too great. The squirrel would be almost sure to land safely either in the lower limb or on the ground. This is more sure in the case of the red squirrel than in that of the gray, for the gray is two or three times the weight of the red. Yet I have seen a gray squirrel come down forty feet though the air and land uninjured. My own method of loosing the unripe burs from their tenacious hold on the limb tips lacks the finesse of that of the squirrel. I do my work with a club. Nevertheless, it takes wisdom and precision. To stand twenty feet or so below a bunch of chestnut burs and hurl your club at them with such accuracy that it hits the limb just behind them at the right spot to snap them off their perch is an art that you must learn in boyhood or never. You may hit the burs themselves or you may hit the limb farther back, and nothing happens. With the burs on the ground your task is to open them, which you must do by pounding with one stone upon another. Hit in the right place and with the right force, the green, prickly envelope yields and the soft, brown nuts roll out uncrushed. To me they are sweetest when this brown is just beginning to tinge them, before the shells are very hard and the kernel is too resilient and crunchy. On these October mornings the chestnuts are ripe,--a wonderful rich brown, still clinging in close companionship in the center of the burs, which have opened and revealed the precious kernels within. To harvest them now by the quart your task is more easy than it was to get a few when they were three weeks younger. The squirrels know this. There is no need to climb to the dangerous limb tips and cling there precariously while gnawing them through. The ground is strewn with bounty, and the reds and the grays both are busy among the rustling brown leaves garnering what the winds, the boys, and I have shaken from the open burs and failed to gather.