ife has accumulated within his skin.

As we might expect from a liver of such a slothful life, the family traits
of the woodchuck are far from admirable and there is said to be little
affection shown by the mother woodchuck toward her young. The poor little
fellows are pushed out of the burrow and driven away to shift for
themselves as soon as possible. Many of them must come to grief from hawks
and foxes. Closely related to the squirrels, these large marmots (for they
are first cousins to the prairie dogs) are as unlike them in activity as
they are in choice of a haunt.

What a contrast to all this is the trim feathered form which we may see on
the mill pond some clear morning. Alert and wary, the grebe paddles slowly
along, watchful of every movement. If we approach too closely, it may
settle little by little, like a submarine opening its water compartments,
until nothing is visible except the head with its sharp beak. Another step
and the bird has vanished, swallowed up by the lake, and the chances are a
hundred to one against our discovering the motionless neck and the tiny
eye which rises again among the water weeds.

This little grebe comes of a splendid line of ancestors, some of which
were even more specialised for an aquatic life. These paid the price of
existence along lines too narrow and vanished from the earth. The grebe,
however, has so far stuck to a life which bids fair to allow his race
safety for many generations, but he is perilously near the limit. Every
fall he migrates far southward, leaving his northern lakes, but if the
water upon which he floats should suddenly dry up, he would be almost as
helpless as the gasping fish; for his wings are too weak to lift him from
the ground. He must needs have a long take-off, a flying start, aided by
vigorous paddling along the surface of the water, before he can rise into
the air.

Millions of years ago there lived birds built on the general grebe plan
and who doubtless were derived from the same original stock, but which
lived in the great seas of that time. Far from being able to migrate,
every external trace of wing was gone and these great creatures, almost as
large as a man and with sharp teeth in their beaks, must have hitched
themselves like seals along the edge of the beach, and perhaps laid their
eggs on the pebbles as do the terns to-day.

The grebe, denied the power to rise easily and even, to ran about on land
without considerable effort, is, h