ll say, as he
looked around on the community which he and his wife had founded, that
he was a citizen of no mean city.

But this could not last. A great calamity was coming--a calamity beside
which the slow destruction of the former town would seem tame and
uninteresting.

One bright February day the Beaver and his wife left their lodge to look
for lily-roots. They had found a big fat one and were just about to
begin their feast, when they heard foot-steps on the ice over their
heads, and the voices of several men talking eagerly. They made for the
nearest burrow as fast as they could go, and stayed there the rest of
the day, and when they returned to their lodge they found--but I'm going
too fast.

The men were Indians and half-breeds, and they were in high feather over
their discovery. Around this pond there must be enough beaver-skins to
keep them in groceries and tobacco and whiskey for a long time to come.
But to find a city is one thing, and to get hold of its inhabitants is
another and a very different one. One of the Indians was an elderly man
who in the old days had trapped beaver in Canada for the Hudson Bay
Company, and he assumed the direction of the work. First of all they
chopped holes in the ice and drove a line of stakes across the stream
just above the pond, so that no one might escape in that direction.
Then, by pounding on the ice, and cutting more holes in it here and
there, they found the entrances to all the lodges and most of the
burrows, and closed them also with stakes driven into the bottom.
Fortunately they did not find the burrow where our Beaver and his wife
had taken refuge. They were about to break open the roofs of the lodges
when the old man proposed that they should play a trick on one of the
beaver families--a trick which his father had taught him when he was a
boy, and when the beavers were many in the woods around Lake Superior.
He described it with enthusiasm, and his companions agreed that it would
be great fun. For a time there was much chopping of ice and driving of
stakes, and then all was quiet again.

By and by one of our Beaver's children began to feel hungry, and as his
father and mother had not come home he decided to go out to the
wood-pile and get something to eat. So he took a header from his bed
into the water, and swam down the angle. The door had been unbarred
again, and he passed out without difficulty, but when he reached the
pile he found it surrounded by a fe