of 



serious life when brilliant clouds of color enrich 

 the hills; helping to harvest the trees that wear 

 the robes of gold, while the birds go by for 

 the southland in the reflective autumn days. If 

 Mother Nature should ever call me to live upon 

 another planet I could wish that I might be 

 born a beaver, to inhabit a house in the water. 

 The autumn of the year when I watched the 

 young beavers I had the pleasure of seeing some 

 immigrants pass me en route for a new home in 

 the Moraine Colony. Of course they may have 

 been only visitors, or have come temporarily to 

 assist in the harvesting; but I like to think of 

 them as immigrants, and a number of things 

 testified that immigrants they were. One even- 

 ing I had long been lying on a boulder by the 

 stream below the colony, waiting for a gift from 

 the gods. It came. Out of the water within ten 

 feet of me scrambled the most patriarchal, as 

 well as the largest, beaver that I have ever seen. 

 I wanted to take off my hat to him, I wanted to 

 ask him to tell me the story of his life, but from 

 long habit I simply lay still and watched and 

 thought in silence. He was making a portage 



38 



