And when
I woke one morning he was sitting there looking in at the window,
waiting for me to get up and bring his breakfast.
In a week he had showed me all his hiding places. The most
interesting of these was over a roofed piazza in a building near
by. He had gnawed a hole under the eaves, where it would not be
noticed, and lived there in solitary grandeur during stormy days
in a den four by eight feet, and rain-proof. In one corner was a
bushel of corncobs, some of them two or three years old, which he
had stolen from a cornfield near by in the early autumn mornings.
With characteristic improvidence he had fallen to eating the corn
while yet there was plenty more to be gathered. In consequence he
was hungry before February was half over, and living by his wits,
like his brother of the wilderness.
The other squirrels soon noticed his journeys to my window, and
presently they too came for their share. Spite of his fury in
driving them away, they managed in twenty ways to circumvent him.
It was most interesting, while he sat on my window-sill eating
peanuts, to see the nose and eyes of another squirrel peering
over the crotch of the nearest tree, watching the proceedings
from his hiding place. Then I would give Meeko five or six
peanuts at once.
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