" This is not meant to indicate that
the squirrels are a part of the bust of Jackson. The two are separate
and distinct. So are the pigeons which alight on friendly hands and
shoulders as do other confident pigeons on Boston Common, and in the
Piazza San Marco, in Venice.
I am always disposed to like the people of a city in which pigeons and
squirrels are tame. Every day, at noon, an old policeman, a former
Confederate soldier I believe he is, comes into the square with a basket
of corn. When he arrives all the pigeons see him and rush toward him in
a great flapping cloud, brushing past your face if you happen to be
walking across the square at the time. Nor is he the only one to feed
them. Numbers of citizens go at midday to the square, where they buy
popcorn and peanuts for the squirrels and pigeons--which, by the way,
are all members of old Memphis families, being descendants of other
squirrels and pigeons which lived in this same place before the Civil
War. One might suppose that the pigeons, being able to fly up to the
seventeenth floor windowsills of the Merchants' Exchange Building, where
men of the grain and hay bureau of the exchange are in the habit of
leaving corn for them, would prosper more than the squirrels, but that
is not the case for--and I regret to have to report such immorality--the
squirrels are in the habit of adding to the stores of peanuts which are
thrown to them, by thievery.
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