THE LIFE STORY OF AN OTTEE 



CHAPTER I 



IN THE NURSERY 



It was in a morass in a hollow of the foothills 

 that he was littered. His mother chose this in- 

 accessible spot for the security it promised to her 

 helpless young. In the heart of the quagmire 

 they would be safe, she thought, from floods and 

 — what was still more important to her — from 

 man. She could not find a hover quite to her 

 liking, but in lack of a better, she chose a ledge 

 where, in an angle of the stream that drained the 

 bog, the bank furnished a screen from the biting 

 wind which blew up the valley and soughed over 

 the uplands. After enlarging the ledge into a 

 shelf, she shaped the excavation for the nest, 

 which she fashioned out of dead rushes and 

 withered grasses, and which she lined with the 

 softest products that Nature offered her — tattered 

 reed-plumes and seed-down of the bulrush. Night 



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