had stretched
on a hoop made of a little birch sapling. It was not a very good pelt,
for, as I said, the Beaver had been losing his hair, but Charlie thought
he might get a dollar or two for it. Whether he needed the dollar more
than the Beaver needed his skin was a question which it seemed quite
useless to discuss.

As we left the shack I noticed the tail lying on the ground just outside
the door.

"Why don't you eat it?" I asked. "Don't you know that a beaver's tail is
supposed to be one of the finest delicacies in the woods?"

"Huh!" said Charlie. "I'd rather have salt pork."

THE KING OF THE TROUT STREAM

IT was winter, and the trout stream ran low in its banks, hidden from
the sky by a thick shell of ice and snow, and not seeing the sun for a
season. But the trout stream was used to that, and it slipped along in
the darkness, undismayed and not one whit disheartened; talking to
itself in low, murmuring tones, and dreaming of the time when spring
would come back and all the rivers would be full.

Mingled with its waters, and borne onward and downward by the ceaseless
flow of its current, went multitudes of the tiniest air-bubbles, most of
them too small ever to be seen by a human eye, yet large enough to be
the very breath of life to thousands and thousands of creatures. Some of
them found their way to the gills of the brook trout, and some to the
minnows, and the herrings, and the suckers, and the star-gazers; some
fed the little crustacea, and the insect larvae, and the other tiny water
animals that make up the lower classes of society; and some passed
undetained down the river and out into Lake Superior. But there were
others that worked down into the gravel of the riverbed; and there, in
the nooks and crannies between the pebbles, they found a vast number of
little balls of yellow-brown jelly, about as large as small peas, which
seemed to be in need of their kindly ministrations. And the air-bubbles
touched the trout eggs gently and lovingly, and in some mysterious and
wonderful way their oxygen passed in through the pores of the shells,
and the embryos within were quickened and stirred to a new vigor and a
more rapid growth.

Not all of the eggs were alive. Some had been crushed between the
stones; some were buried in sediment, which had choked the pores and
kept away the friendly oxygen until they smothered; and some had never
really lived at all. But one danger they had been spared, for there