beaver tracks in the mud. These he followed rapidly along the bank until he came to where it overhung the water and there he found his mate waiting for him with glad eyes.

Shaggycoat went up to her and rubbed his nose against hers. It was not like his grandfather's nose, cold and repellent, but warm and caressing. He backed away a pace or two to look at her and there was new joy in his heart.

She was not quite as large as he, and her coat was just a shade lighter drab, but she was very sleek and Shaggycoat was well satisfied.

I know not what they said there under the shelving bank, during their first tryst, but I do not agree with those niggardly naturalists who would strip the brute kingdom of feeling and intelligence and the power to express joy and pain, and appropriate all these feelings to themselves.

It may be that Shaggycoat told his newly found mate how bright her eyes were and how long he had searched for her or perhaps she confessed that she had seen him many times just around the bend in the stream, but had not thought that he was looking for her. We are none of us certain of any of these things, but we are sure of one thing. It was a very happy meeting.

Then Shaggycoat led the way through lake and river to many wonderful water grottoes; to deep pools where the bottom of the lake was as dark and forbidding as midnight, or to shallows, where the bottom of the stream was gay with bright pebbles, and where the sunlight danced upon the uneven water until it made a wondrous many colored mirror.

He showed her his waterfall, and a part of a small dam that he had constructed just for fun across a little brook. The waterfall was not really his any more than it was any one else's, but he called it his.

These and many other water wonders he showed his young mate, and her eyes grew brighter as the wonders of their world grew. She wondered how he had traveled so far, and seen so many things. But all the time Shaggycoat was leading the way toward a dear little brook that he knew of away back in the wilderness, in one of the fastnesses of nature. He had a definite plan in his head concerning this stream. He had made it weeks before and arranged many of its details. But one day as they journeyed, a sad accident befell Brighteyes, and for a time it bade fair to end all their hopes.

They were swimming leisurely up stream and had stopped at the mouth of a little rill where the water was very fresh, when Brighteyes discovered a stick of sweet smelling birch hanging just above the water's edge. It fairly made her mouth water.

But Shaggycoat was suspicious. He had seen wood fixed like this before. He had tasted it and something had caught him by the paw, and only after several hours of wrenching had he been able to free himself. Even then he had left one claw and a part of the toe in the trap.

So he pushed Brighteyes from the trap and tried to hurry away with her. But, with true feminine wilfulness and curiosity, she persisted, and a moment later the trap was sprung and she was held fast by the toes of one of her forefeet.

She tugged and twisted, pulled and turned in every direction, but it would not let go. Then Shaggycoat got hold of the chain with his teeth and pulled too, but with no better success.

Brighteyes struggled until her paw was nearly wrenched from the shoulder, but the persistent thing that held her by three toes still clung like a vise.

At last when both beavers were filled with despair, and a wild terror of being held so firmly had seized them, a bright idea came to Shaggycoat. He gnawed off the stake that held the chain upon the trap and his mate was free to go, with the trap still clinging to her paw, and the chain rattling along upon the stones. Then they tried all sorts of experiments to get the trap off, the two most ingenious ways being drowning it, and burying it in the mud, and then seeking to steal away quietly without disturbing it. But the trap was not to be taken unawares in this way, and always followed. Finally it caught between two stones where the brook was shallow, and came off itself. You may imagine they were glad to see the last of it, and Brighteyes never forgot the lesson.

It was several days before her shoulder got fairly over the wrenching, but it may have saved her glossy coat in after years.

Finally, after traveling leisurely for about a week, they came to the mountain stream that Shaggycoat had in mind. It wound through a broad alder covered meadow, with steep foothills a mile or so back on either side. The meadow was about two miles long and at the lower end, where the stream ran into a narrow valley, there were two large pines, one on either bank.

Up in the foothills were innumerable birch and maple saplings and here and there in the meadow were knolls of higher land, covered with small pines and spruces.

Perhaps Shaggycoat had seen this wild meadow covered with water in the spring during a freshet, or maybe he had only imagined it, but there was a picture in his active mind of a strong beaver dam at the foot of the narrows and a broad lake that should be enclosed by the foothills; upon the islands were to be many beaver lodges, the first of which should be occupied by Brighteyes and himself.

CHAPTER IV

HOW THE GREAT DAM WAS BUILT

Shaggycoat, of course, had had no experience in dam-building, but he had often watched repairs upon the dam in the colony where he and his grandfather lived, before that terrible winter and the destruction of their snug city. He was too young at the time to be allowed to help in such important work as strengthening the dam, which needed old and wise heads, but there was no rule against his watching and seeing how it was done.

He had planned to model his dam in the alder meadow after the one at the old colony.

He had traveled many weary miles by lakes and rivers, to find a spot where such a dam could be built. A broad meadow surrounded by foothills, with a narrow neck at the lower end where the dam was to be, and large trees near to use in its construction. There were many places where the ordinary dams, made of short sections of logs, piled up like a cob house, could be built. The brush and stone dam could also be made almost anywhere, but the kind Shaggycoat wanted, which was easier to make than any other could be built only in certain places, so he had chosen the spot with great care.

His observation of repairs on the old dam would stand him in good stead, but even had he not seen this work, it is probable that his beaver's building instinct would have supplied the needed knowledge. His kind had been dam builders for ages.

It was the beaver dams of the eighteenth century that gave us most of our pleasant meadows, where hay and crops now grow so plentifully. Originally these lowlands were covered with timber, but the beaver dams overflowed the valleys, and made them fertile. This also killed off the timber, which finally rotted and fell into the water, and the meadow was cleared as effectually as though the settlers had done it with their axes. Traces of these dams may still be found.

Just to illustrate how ingrained the building instinct is in the beaver: a young beaver was held in captivity in the third story of an apartment house in London. There were no sticks, no mud, nor anything to suggest building. He had no parents to teach him this industry, yet he soon set to work and built brushes, shoes, hassocks, and anything else movable that he could get hold of into a wall across one corner of the room. This was his dam.

One October evening, when the harvest moon was at its full and its mellow radiance shimmered on tree-top and water, and the world was like a beautiful dream, half in light, half in shadow, Shaggycoat and Brighteyes took their places at the foot of one of the great pines at the lower end of the meadow and the work of dam-building began. But just how they set to work you could never guess, unless you are