ed to the edge of the nest. And
there we sat, we three, with the wonder upon us all, the young eagles
at our feet, the cliff above, and, three hundred feet below, the
spruce tops of the wilderness reaching out and away to the mountains
beyond the big lake. I sat perfectly still, which is the only way to
reassure a wild creature; and soon I thought Cheplahgan had lost his
fear in his anxiety for the little ones. But the moment I rose to go
he was in the air again, circling restlessly above my head with his
mate, the same wild fierceness in his eyes as he looked down. A
half-hour later I had gained the top of the cliff and started eastward
towards the lake, coming down by a much easier way than that by which
I went up. Later I returned several times, and from a distance watched
the eaglets being fed. But I never climbed to the nest again.

One day, when I came to the little thicket on the cliff where I used
to lie and watch the nest through my glass, I found that one eaglet
was gone. The other stood on the edge of the nest, looking down
fearfully into the abyss, whither, no doubt, his bolder nest mate had
flown, and calling disconsolately from time to time. His whole
attitude showed plainly that he was hungry and cross and lonesome.
Presently the mother-eagle came swiftly up from the valley, and there
was food in her talons. She came to the edge of the nest, hovered over
it a moment, so as to give the hungry eaglet a sight and smell of
food, then went slowly down to the valley, taking the food with her,
telling the little one in her own way to come and he should have it.
He called after her loudly from the edge of the nest, and spread his
wings a dozen times to follow. But the plunge was too awful; his heart
failed him; and he settled back in the nest, and pulled his head down
into his shoulders, and shut his eyes, and tried to forget that he was
hungry. The meaning of the little comedy was plain enough. She was
trying to teach him to fly, telling him that his wings were grown and
the time was come to use them; but he was afraid.

In a little while she came back again, this time without food, and
hovered over the nest, trying every way to induce the little one to
leave it. She succeeded at last, when with a desperate effort he
sprang upward and flapped to the ledge above, where I had sat and
watched him with Old Whitehead. Then, after surveying the world
gravely from his new place, he flapped back to the nest, and turned