nce made of stakes set so close
together that he could not pass between them. He swam clear around it,
and at last found one gap just wide enough to admit his body. He passed
in, and as he did so his back grazed a small twig which had been thrust
down through a hole in the ice, and the watching Indians saw it move,
and knew that a beaver had entered the trap. He picked out a nice stick
of convenient size, and started to return to the lodge. But where was
that gap in the fence? This was the place, he was sure. Here were two
stakes between which he had certainly passed as he came in, but now
another stood squarely between them, and the gate was barred. He swam
all round the wood-pile, looking for a way out, and poking his little
brown nose between the stakes, but there was no escape, and when he came
back to the entrance and found it still closed his last hope died, and
he gave up in despair. His heart and lungs and all his circulatory
apparatus had been so designed by the Great Architect that he might live
for many minutes under water, but they could not keep him alive
indefinitely. Overhead was the ice, and all around was that cruel fence.
Only a rod away was home, where his brothers and sisters were waiting
for him, and where there was air to breathe and life to live--but he
could not reach it. You have all read or heard how a drowning man feels,
and I suppose it is much the same with a drowning beaver. They say it is
an easy death.

By and by a hooked stick came down through a hole in the ice and drew
him out, the gate was unbarred, the twig was replaced, and the Indians
waited for another hungry little beaver to come for his dinner. That's
enough. You know now what the parents found when they came home--or
rather what they didn't find.

It would have taken too long to dispose of the whole city in this way,
so the Indians finally broke the dam and let the water out of the pond,
and then they tore open the lodges and all the burrows they could find,
and the inhabitants were put to the--not the sword, but the axe and the
club. Of all those who had been so happy and prosperous, the old Beaver
and his wife were the only ones who escaped; and their lives were spared
only because the Indians failed to find their hiding-place.

That was the end of the second city, but it was not quite the end of the
beavers. A few miles up-stream they dug a short burrow in the bank and
tried to make a new home. In May another baby came, bu