The Squirrel by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

Books at bedtime by calming anxiety, the squirrel by Mary E. Wilkins.

The squirrel lived with his lifelong mate near the farmhouse. He considered himself very rich because he owned an English walnut tree. Neither he nor his mate had the least out that it belonged to them and not to the farmer. They were not many like it in the state or the whole country.

It was a beautiful tree with a mighty spread of branches full of nile strength. Nearly every year there was a goodly promise of nuts which never came to anything so far as the people in the farmhouse were concerned. Every summer they looked hopefully at the laden branches and said to each other, "This year we shall have nuts, but they were never any. They could not understand it, but they were old people and had been boys in the family.

It might have been different. Probably they would have solved the mystery. It was simple enough. The squirrel and his mate considered the nuts as theirs and appropriated them.

They loved nuts. They were their natural sustenance and through having an unquestioning though unwitting belief and providence, they considered that nuts which grew within their reach were placed there for them as a matter of course. They were the squirrel and they were the nuts. No nuts, no squirrel.

The conclusion was obvious to such simple intelligences. As soon as the nuts were ripe, the squirrel and his mate were busy all day, gathering the nuts and then carrying them in their swollen cheek pouches to their little storehouse under the wood pile. Back and forth they sped. With such smooth swiftness that it was no more perceptible than the passing of a beam of light.

The squirrels were very near the colour tones of the tree which, moreover, held its leaves late. Only a boy would have been likely to spy them out. It is a strange thing about those nuts. The farmer's wife often said to her husband, peering up at the tree with her dim old eyes and he ascended.

The old couple were given to sitting out on their porch after supper as long as the evenings were warm enough and it was a late autumn that year. There were occasional frosts but summer like days between. The farmer and his wife were a fond old couple. They had never had any children and the sympathy of their own natures had drawn them more closely together through the long years.

They looked and thought alike, if anything the wife had the stronger nature of the two, but both of them were gentle. Yet, with a certain weariness and truedness, not unlike that of the squirrels, they were very careful of their money and saved every penny and had made considerable provision for their old age. They looked forward to nothing except perfect peace and comfort on this earth for the rest of their lives and asked for what would come after they had a religious hope. They had always looked at their English walnut tree and speculated as to what could have overcome those nuts, but the speculation did not disturb them at all.

They took things which had happened for some time easily, being gently conservative to the bone. "Seems as if them nuts must drop off that tree and be picked up," said the farmer, "but there ain't no boys." "No, there ain't no boys," said his wife. Sometimes the father used to walk about under the tree and look on the ground for fallen nuts, and his wife did likewise, but they never found any.

They were not aware of four of the keenest eyes of watchfulness and weariness in the whole world that tend to ponder from some corner of hiding. Now and then, they saw one of the squirrels slipping along the stone wall and looked at him with the interest which always attaches to a squirrel. Perhaps because the swiftness of his passing from observation gives him a certain rarity and preciousness. Sometimes the farmer's wife observed one sitting upright on the wall holding a nut in its forepaw and nibbling at it boldly.

"Maybe he has got one of our walnuts," she said. "He couldn't get the whole tree," said the farmer. "No, he couldn't, ascended the wife." The capacity of the squirrels for excelling in their given walk of life was as much of a secret to them as was theirs to the squirrel.

It was in the bright, clear morning that they often caught glimpses of the squirrels for the morning was their pierest of fullest life and activity. Then when the smell of passing leaves and ripened fruit was in the air and the grass was white and crisp with something between frost and dew, the squirrels feel their joy of life to the utmost. They darted, hither and yon, mostly unabserved since they could fairly outspeed human observation, and they had to knut on the tree, not one that fell, escaped them. They went to and fro between the tree and their horde under the wood pile.

They were very rich indeed. That year there had been nearly a bushel of nuts on the English wall, and they had garnered them all, the same delight in their providence and the sense of self-congratulation and security as to the future, were over them as over the old couple in the farmhouse. They too looked forward to peace and comfort on earth, as for the unknown future, they did not dream it existed. They had no religious hope, but their utter lack of questioning made them too trussful frangity.

They had no premonitions of a future stage, where there might be no storm rolls for them running along, and no nut trees, and yet squirrels. Their needs and their supplies were in tiratis not to be separated by any conception of theirs. When they had garnered every nut from the English wall nut tree, they were indeed an opulent pair. They were, of course, acquainted with other squirrels, but none of them approached themselves in point of richness.

None of the others had English walnuts, and none had such a plentiful store. They looked forward to a winter of backness and luxury in love. For the two little creatures loved each other as faithfully as did the old couple in the farmhouse. None of the other squirrels knew of their hiding place under the wood pile.

Nobody had discovered the cunning passage which led to it. In the last of October, they felt perfectly secure. They had reached that point, so seldom reached by either men or squirrels when care as to material things is over. Then came the day of their downfall.

The farmer's wife thought that the wood pile should be taken down, and the wood split and stored in the shed before winter setting. The farmer obediently began the task. It was not a large pile, and he was too thrifty to hire help. He chopped away patiently day after day, but it was a long time before the squirrels fairly took alarm for the safety of their store.

They had grown to believe in its impregnability, and the impregnability of their right at possession. They kept out of the way, while the old man was at work, scampering in the autumn woods and enjoying themselves, and always with the thought of their boundful provision for the future in mind. At last, they began to grow anxious. They hung a loof and chatted angrily.

They sat on the stone wall, with great tailed arching over their backs, so near that the gentle long man thought they must be growing tame, and at last the blow fell. One morning, the farmer discovered the squirrels' hoard. He went out into the house and told his wife, "What do you think?" he said. "It was them squirrels.

They have stole all lemmenglish walnuts." "You don't say so," she said. "Yes, they have. There's no a bushel of them under the wood pile."

"You don't say so," she said again. The old couple went out together and looked at the winter hoard of the other couple. "Well," said the farmer's wife. "You'll have to get the bushel basket and pick them up and bring them into the house and spread them out on the garret floor.

It's the first time we've had any nuts of that tree. I declare them squirrels have been stealing them all this time." The old man hesitated. He was as thrifty as his wife and had his greater pleasure in possessions, but he had more points of view.

Seems kind of too bad when they worked too hard, you remarked. "Why is it too bad? Ain't they are nuts?" said the wife, with wonder in her soft eyes. They stole our nuts.

"Well," said the old man. He got the bushel basket and gathered up the nuts. There was distracted, but wary, comments from the squirrels. They skirmished about on the stone wall and watched this run upon their little bank with an availing chatters of protest.

"At this time, if they had had faith, they may have lost it." At the beginning of winter, the squirrel and his mate no longer young, were thrown upon the world's penniless and all their season's laver was lost. When the nuts were all heaped upon the garret floor, the old man in his wife looked at them. The old man was still doubtful.

It seems most too bad when they worked so hard, don't it?" he said, with a break in his voice. Ain't they are nuts and didn't they steal them, returned his wife? He was as kindly as our husband, except when it came to questions of sheer justice. Then she was pitiless.

But the old man was still anxious. All that day, he had an eye upon the frenzied squirrels, starting hither and the other, along the wall, with occasional peeps of unbelief that the worst was true at their violated storehouse. At night, he went down to the village store and purchased a bushel of shag-barks and brought them home, leaning painfully to one side with their weight. He stole out to the wood pile, all unseen by his wife, and deposited them in the squirrel's hiding place.

The next day, and several days after that, he had an attack of rheumatism and was unable to chop wood. Then a light snow came, the first of the season, and he said to his wife that he didn't know, but it might be just as well to leave the rest of that wood pile for a while, seeing as he was so lame in his joints, and the wood was so wet, and the shed, not about full anyway. And she ascended, saying that she guessed there was about enough wood in the shed to last till spring, and she didn't want him to get any more coal, and it cost so much to hire. She suspected nothing about the shag-barks and the squirrels, and the old man did not tell her, though he felt guilty.

He had never been in the habit of concealing anything from his faithful old helmet, nor even his good deeds. But there were some deeds, which are too intimate for one's self and God, for even the listening air of a human love, and too much a part of the soul that even wedlocked to unveil. Then too, the old man was afraid that his wife would think that he had been extravagant. A farmer used often to gaze out of the window from behind his wife's blooming row of tyranniums, and think with a sensation which was like a warmth that his soul had the squirrels were so supplied with plenty for their needs until spring.

But he crept out one day when his wife was away and investigated, and not a nut was in the storehouse. He straightened his rheumatic back painfully and stared at a little empty cellar. Then the chatter of squirrel struck his deliath. He looked for a long time and finally spied him sitting on the stone wall, eyeing him with the various eyes of incipient motion.

His tail was already stiffened for flight. I wonder if that's one of them thought the old man. He could not know that the squirrel and his mate had moved all their new stores of nuts to another hiding place in the woods at the foot of the birch tree, because they were filled with suspicion and distrust of him. His restitution was nothing.

What were shag barks to English warm nuts? They were of an inferior quality anyway, and how did they alter the fact of the appropriation of the others? The gentle old man whistled. He knew the thief he asked.

In the squirrel began to chatter fiercely at the farmer, though he was always ready to fly at the slightest motion. The frosty air seemed to barely shiver and shake with a tiny volley of accusation. There was the thief who had stolen the store which had been provided for himself and his mate by the providence which had created them. There was the thief who had sinned doubly, both against them and the providence which had shaped both their needy and their supply.

Finally, the old man went back to the house, and the squirrel slipped swiftly away through the stone walls towards his secret dwelling. When the farmer's wife returned, she proposed cracking some of the English warm nuts. They must be dry enough now, she said, so the old man brought some down from the garret and felt her work. "I don't know as I want any," he remarked as he pounded.

"I never did care much about nuts anyway, and somehow I always felt as if we'd stolen the squirrels after they'd worked so hard." "How silly you be," said his wife, but she looked at him lovingly. He were always too tender-hearted for your own good. Talk about stealing.

It was the squirrels that stole our nuts. But the squirrel and his mate, whose ancestors had held the whole land and the fruit thereof in feudal tenure to the creator of it all since the beginning of things had different views. They were in the woods, champing their supper of shag barks and often find a worthy one, and they considered that the farmer had stole their nuts.