ime city, for most of its streets
were of water, like those of Venice; rich cargoes of food-stuffs came
floating to its very doors, and they themselves were navigators from
their earliest youth, and took to the water as naturally as ducks or
Englishmen. They were lumbermen, too, and when the timber was all cut
from along the shores of the pond they dug canals across the low, level,
marshy ground, back to the higher land where the birch and the poplar
still grew, and floated the branches and the smaller logs down the
artificial water-ways. And there were land roads, as well as canals, for
here and there narrow trails crossed the swamp, showing where
generations of busy workers had passed back and forth between the felled
tree and the water's edge. Streets, canals, public works, dwellings,
commerce, lumbering, rich stores laid up for the winter--what more do
you want to constitute a city, even if the houses are few in number, and
the population somewhat smaller than that of London or New York?

[Illustration: "_On the grass in the warm, quiet sunshine of an autumn
afternoon._"]

There was a time, not very long before the Beaver was born, when for a
few years the city was deserted. The trappers had swept through the
country, and the citizens' skulls had been hung up on the bushes, while
their skins went to the great London fur market. Few were left alive,
and those few were driven from their homes and scattered through the
woods. The trappers decided that the ground was worked out, and most of
them pushed on to the north and west in search of regions not yet
depopulated. Then, one by one, the beavers came back to their old
haunts. The broken dam was repaired; new lodges were built, and new
beavers born in them; and again the ancient town was alive with the play
of the babies and the labors of the civil engineers. Not as populous,
perhaps, as it had once been, but alive, and busy, and happy. And so it
was when our Beaver came into the world.

The first year of his life was an easy one, especially the winter, when
there was little for anyone to do except to eat, to sleep, and now and
then to fish for the roots of the yellow water-lily in the soft mud at
the bottom of the pond. During that season he probably accomplished more
than his parents did, for if he could not toil he could at least grow.
Of course they may have been growing, too, but it was less noticeable in
them than in him. Not only was he increasing in size and