their peculiar fashion--and I wish there
were none worse than they in the city's slums._

_I have said good-by to the Glimmerglass, and it may be that I shall
never again make my home by its shores. But the life of the woods goes
on, and will still go on as long as man will let it. I suppose that,
even as I write, the bears are "holeing up" for the winter, and the deer
are growing anxious because the snow is covering the best of their food,
and they of the cat tribe are getting down to business, and hunting in
deadly earnest. The loons and the ducks have pulled out for the Gulf of
Mexico, and the squirrels are glad that they have such a goodly store of
nuts laid up for the next four months. The beavers have retired to their
lodges--that is, if Charley Roop and his fellows have left any of them
alive. The partridges--well, the partridges will just have to get along
the best way they can. I guess they'll pull through somehow. The
porcupines are all right, as you will presently see if you read this
book. They don't have to worry. Down in the bed of the trout stream the
trout eggs are getting ready--getting ready. And out on the lake itself
the frost is at work, and the ice-sheet is forming, and under that cold,
white lid the Glimmerglass will wait till another year brings round
another spring-time--the spring-time that will surely come to all of us
if only we hold on long enough._

_Chicago, December, 1901._

THE BIOGRAPHY OF A BEAVER

A BROAD, flat tail came down on the water with a whack that sent the
echoes flying back and forth across the pond, and its owner ducked his
head, arched his back, and dived to the bottom. It was a very curious
tail, for besides being so oddly paddle-shaped it was covered with what
looked like scales, but were really sections and indentations of hard,
horny, blackish-gray skin. Except its owner's relations, there was no
one else in all the animal kingdom who had one like it. But the
strangest thing about it was the many different ways in which he used
it. Just now it was his rudder--and a very good rudder, too.

In a moment his little brown head reappeared, and he and his brothers
and sisters went chasing each other round and round the pond, ducking
and diving and splashing, raising such a commotion that they sent the
ripples washing all along the grassy shores, and having the jolliest
kind of a time. It isn't the usual thing for young beavers to be out in
broad daylight, but al