Strong’s pet squirrel

Of all the people who know something about George Templeton Strong, I wonder how many know he had a pet squirrel when he was a young man? It was a black squirrel, and he first mentioned it on January 31, 1847, when he was 27 years old:

Going to be sick, I think, so specially wretched have I been today with every sort of horrid dyspeptic sensation. My little black friend Teufelchen—or whatever is his proper style and title—I mean my black squirrel, is an invalid too, and has been sitting grunting on my lap all the afternoon in great affliction.

The next thing we hear of him is on October 10 of the same year, when Teufelchen has passed away.

My poor little black squirrel expired after a tedious illness Friday night, poor little thing; he was so weak and unable to move that he couldn’t have enjoyed life much. Wonder what the matter with him could have been. It’s very unpleasant to see a pet animal sick, especially when he’s quite tame and gentle and seems to appeal to one for help and comfort.

I seem to see more black or melanistic squirrels in New York City than I used to in Cambridge, and I imagined that the griminess of New York, especially in the past, might have favored darker squirrels, just as soot in England led to the development of the peppered moth.* But there seems to be no basis to this theory.

*Quick digression: Margaret Drabble is one of my favorite authors, but her novel The Peppered Moth, based on the life of her mother, is excruciatingly depressing. If you haven’t read Drabble before, don’t start with The Peppered Moth. Start with The Realms of Gold, The Ice Age, or The Radiant Way, the first volume of a trilogy that continues with A Natural Curiosity and concludes with The Gates of Ivory.