DWELLINGS OF MUSKRAT AND BEAVER—GILPIN. 277 
lakes or rather large ponds naturally are formed here from the 
rains of the adjacent hills, one of which isin Winslow’s lake, about 
four miles from Digby town. This alpine lakelet of about eighty 
or one hundred acres, hidden by sterile hills of columnar trap, 
lightly fringed by spruce, fir and pine, scrubby bushes, its shores 
paved with rugged trap boulders, and its clear waters fringed 
with rushes, affords a secluded home for the muskrats which 
have colonized it for years. A wounded scoter unable to rise 
the hills betwixt the Bay of Fundy and the Digby basin finds 
his rest there, and an annual flock of spirit ducks (B. albeole.) 
the gaudy purple male, dusky female with obscurely marked 
young, always during autumn make a halt there. Save an idle 
boy from the town, or prying naturalist added, no others disturb 
his quiet. We visited the lake in Nov. 11th, 1880, conveying a 
canoe over the mountain with us; a cold November wind was 
urling its waters into tiny wavelets, and we soon reached their 
domes ; about twenty yards from shore, in two feet water, and 
standing amongst the thick rushes and tall grasses. We found 
cones from two and a half to three feet high, and about four 
feet diameter, formed of sods of water grass in masses of five or 
six inches, conical heaps of sodded grass. The lake may have 
contained from twenty-five to thirty within its borders. The 
grass they were constructed from was very abundant, growing 
at the lake bottom, and spread in heaps and festoons, along the 
lee shores of the lake, being torn by the roots from the shallow 
waters by the autumn gales. Separated from its sods and wreaths, 
it resolved itself into distinct rootlets, very fibrous and about 
three inches long, surmounted by a tussock of grass with leaves 
about three inches in length. My friend Dr. Somers classified it 
for me, as (Eriocaulon septangulare Pipeworth). Our canoe was 
soon grounded upon one of these grass made conical heaps, and 
my son with his paddle tore off its head. After tearing away 
about a foot, we came to a cavity roughly formed by the body 
of the muskrat, lined with grass, and scarcely double his own 
size. It looked in its careless roughness like the nest of the fly- 
ing squirrel found often in the interior of a mass of grasses and 
moss gathered in the forks of a pine tree. Proceeding in our de- 
