nd jumped back into
the water the way he had come; but, alas! he took his enemy with him.
The heavy trap dragged him to the bottom like a stone, and the short
chain fastened to a stake kept him from going very far toward home. For
a few minutes he struggled with all his might, and the soft black mud
rose about him in inky clouds. Then he quieted down and lay very, very
still; and the next day the trapper came along and pulled him out by
the chain.

Something else happened the same night. Another wise old beaver, the
head man of another lodge, was killed by a falling tree. He ought to
have known better than to let such a thing happen. I really don't see
how he could have been so careless. But the best of us will make
mistakes at times, and any pitcher may go once too often to the well. I
suppose that he had felled hundreds of trees and bushes, big and little,
in the course of his life, and he had never yet met with an accident;
but this time he thought he would take one more bite after the tree had
really begun to fall. So he thrust his head again into the narrowing
notch, and the wooden jaws closed upon him with a nip that was worse
than his own. He tried to draw back, but it was too late, his skull
crashed in, and his life went out like a candle.

And so, in a few hours, the city lost two of its best citizens--the very
two whom it could least afford to lose. If they had been spared they
might, perhaps, have known enough to scent the coming danger, and to
lead their families and neighbors away from the doomed town, deeper into
the heart of the wilderness. As it was, the trapper had things all his
own way, and by working carefully and cautiously he added skin after
skin to his store of beaver-pelts. I haven't time to tell you of all the
different ways in which he set his traps, nor can we stop to talk of the
various baits that he used, from castoreum to fresh sticks of birch or
willow, or of those other traps, still more artfully arranged, which had
no bait at all, but were cunningly hidden where the poor beavers would
be almost certain to step into them before they saw them. After all, it
was his awful success that mattered, rather than the way in which he
achieved it. Our friend's mother was one of the next to go, and the way
his brothers and sisters disappeared one after another was a thing to
break one's heart.

One night the Beaver himself came swimming down the pond, homeward
bound, and as he dived and approache