Mourns Over Severed Head of Mate With Intensity That Seems Almost Human.

Almost every public park in the United Sates has its lively and half-domesticated colony of squirrels, and there is no other creature of the woods and fields with which city children may—and do—become so familiar. An interesting story which shows the depth of feeling which these little animals are capable, comes to the companion from Waterloo, Ia.:

A physician who lives near one of the parks in that city had long had an especial interest in a pair of squirrels which made their home in a tree within sight of his house. One day he noticed that one of this pair was running up and down a certain tree in the park, meanwhile chattering in the greatest excitement. Finally the little fellow appeared on a branch, holding between his paws the severed head of his mate, over which he was moaning and whining pitifully. On investigation, it appeared that the dead squirrel had been caught an actually decapitated by a limb split off from the tree by a storm of the night before. The grief-stricken mate would not abandon the body all that day, and mourned over the severed head with an intensity and absorption which seemed almost human, with a depth of emotion indeed, of which some human beings are hardly capable.

Minnetonka Record, January 19, 1912