amined him with a microscope you would have seen a most strange
and beautiful thing. His little body was so delicate and transparent
that one could see the arteries pulsing and throbbing in time with the
beating of his heart, and some of those arteries found their way into
the food-sac, where they kept branching and dividing, and growing
smaller and more numerous. And in the very smallest of the tiny tubes a
wonderful process was going on--as wonderful as the way in which the
oxygen fed the embryos through the shell. Somehow, by life's marvellous
alchemy, the blood was laying hold of the material of the yolk, turning
it into more blood, and carrying it away to be used in building up bone
and muscle everywhere from the tip of his nose to the end of his tail.
You might not have detected the actual transformation, but you could
have seen the beating of the engine, and the throbbing rush of the
little red rivers, all toiling with might and main to make a big, strong
trout out of this weak and diminutive baby. And you could have seen the
corpuscles hurrying along so thick and fast that at times they blocked
up the passages, and the current was checked till the heart could bring
enough pressure to bear to burst the dam and send them rushing on again.
For the corpuscles of a trout's blood are considerably larger than those
of most fishes, and they sometimes get "hung up," like a drive of logs
sent down a stream hardly large enough to float it.

With a full haversack to be drawn upon in such a convenient manner the
Troutlet was not obliged to take food through his mouth or to think
about hustling around in search of a living. This was very fortunate,
for the stream was full of hungry beasts of prey who would be very
likely to gobble him up quick the first time he went abroad; and,
besides, his frail little body was still so weak and delicate that he
could not bear the light of day. So, instead of swimming away to seek
his fortune, he simply dived down deeper into the gravel, and stayed
there. For some weeks he led a very quiet life among the pebbles, and
the only mishap that befell him during that time was the direct result
of his retiring disposition. In his anxiety to get as far away from the
world as possible he one day wedged himself into a cranny so narrow that
he couldn't get out again. He couldn't even breathe, for his gill-covers
were squeezed down against the sides of his head as if he were in a
vise. A trout's method o