100 YEARS AGO The squirrel’s demise

One day when Eppie Callum had filled her teapot, she popped in an acorn,“just for luck”she said.

The result was certainly an extra good cup. When the leaves were thrown out and the acorn with them, a sharp-eyed squirrel, perched on the top of a tall spruce nearby, thought to himself,“that’s for me,”and smartly leaping down from branch to branch, in a twinkling he had the nut imprisoned in a hole where he was storing a winter hoard.

Chuckling over his find, he gaily scrambled up the tree again, but alas, he never reached his perch.

Before he was half way up, a tiny red and white beast darted on him like the flash of an electric spark, fastening its gleaming teeth in the back of his neck, and was sucking his life-blood before he and the weasel together fell to earth. The struggle was short. Never would the squirrel dig up that hoard, which he had gathered with so much forethought.

Eppie picked up the dead thing and put it under the sod the next day, never dreaming that the tragedy was her good luck.

But there is new life as well as the remains of old underground.

(To be continued)