t only one, and it
was dead before it was born. Next day the mother died too, and the
Beaver left the burrow and went out into the world alone. I really think
his heart was broken, though it continued to beat for several months
longer.

Just northeast of the Glimmerglass there lies a long, narrow pond, whose
shores are very low and swampy, and whose waters drain into the larger
lake through a short stream only a few rods in length. Hundreds,
perhaps thousands, of years ago the narrow strip of land that separates
them may possibly have been a beaver-dam, but to-day it is hard to tell
it from one of Nature's own formations. In the course of his lonely
wanderings the Beaver reached this pond, and here he established himself
to spend his last few weeks. He was aging rapidly. Such a little while
ago he had seemed in the very prime of life, and had been one of the
handsomest beavers in the woods, with fur of the thickest and softest
and silkiest, and a weight of probably sixty pounds. Now he was thin and
lean, his hair was falling out, his teeth were losing their sharp edges
and becoming blunt and almost useless, and even his flat tail was
growing thicker and more rounded, and its whack was not as startling as
of old when he brought it down with all his might on the surface of the
water.

Yet even now the old instinct flamed up and burned feebly for a little
while. Or shall we say the old love of work, and of using the powers and
faculties that God had given him? Why should the thing that is called
genius in a man be set down as instinct when we see it on a somewhat
smaller scale in an animal? Whatever it was, the ruling passion was
still strong. All his life he had been a civil engineer; and now, one
dark, rainy autumn night, he left his shallow burrow, swam down the pond
to its outlet, and began to build a dam. The next day, pushing up the
shallow stream in my dug-out canoe, I saw the alder-cuttings lying in
its bed, with the marks of his dull teeth on their butts. God knows why
he did it, or what he was thinking about as he cut those bushes and
dragged them into the water. I don't; but sometimes I wonder if a wild
dream of a new lodge, a new mate, a new home, and a new city was
flitting through his poor, befogged old brain.

It was only a few nights later that he put his foot into Charlie Roop's
beaver-trap, jumped for deep water, and was drowned like his father
before him. Charlie afterward showed me the pelt, which he