IN THE LITTLE BROOK. 361 



the breeding season the male is painted in colors as beautiful as 

 those of the wood warblers. "When you go to the brook in the 

 spring you will find him there, and if you catch him and turn him 

 over on his side you will see the colors that he shows to his mate, 

 and which her choice through ages has tended to develop in him. 

 But do not hurt him. He can only breathe for a moment out of 

 water. Put him back in the brook and let him paint its bottom 

 the colors of a rainbow, a sunset, or a garden of roses. All that can 

 be done with blue, crimson, and green pigments in fish ornamenta- 

 tion you will find in some brook in which the darters live. It is in 

 the limestone brooks that flow into the Tennessee and Cumberland 

 where they are found at their brightest, but the Ozark region comes 

 in for a close second. 



There will be sticklebacks in your brook, but the other fishes 

 do not like them, for they are tough and dry of flesh, and their 

 sharp spines make them hard to swallow and harder still to digest. 

 They hide beneath the overhanging tufts of grass, and dart out 

 swiftly at whatever passes by. They tear the fins of the minnows, 

 rob the nests of the sunfish, drag out the eggs of the suckers, and 

 are busy from morn to night at whatever mischief is possible in 

 the brook. 



The male dresses in jet-black when the breeding season is on, 

 sometimes with a further ornament of copper-red or of scarlet. 

 The sticklebacks build nests in which to hide their eggs, and over 

 these the male stands guard, defending them with courage which 

 would be dauntless in any animal more than two inches long. Very 

 often he has to repel the attacks of the female herself, who, being 

 relieved of all responsibility for her offspring, is prone to turn can- 

 nibal. Even the little dwellers of the brook have their own trou- 

 bles and adversities and perversities. 



Last of all comes the blob, or miller's thumb, who hides in dark- 

 ness and picks up all that there is left. He is scaleless and slippery, 

 large of head, plump of body, and with no end of appetite. He 

 lurks under stones when the water is cold. He is gray and green- 

 ish, like the bottom in color. He robs the buried nests of eggs, 

 swallows the young fishes, devours the dead ones, and checks the 

 undue increase of all, not forgetting his own kind. When he has 

 done his work and the fall has come and gone, and the winter and 

 the spring return, the brook once more fills with fishes, and there 

 are the same kinds, with the same actions, the same ways, and the 

 same numbers, and one might think from year to year, as the sun 

 is said to do, that these were the selfsame waters and the selfsame 

 fishes mating over and over again and feeding on the selfsame food. 



But this is not so. The old stage remains, or seems to remain, 



