FEBRUARY 301 



Here a semi-activity on milder days alter- 

 nates with entire seclusion in the coldest 

 weather. 



THE MUSKRAT'S MOUND 



The ghost of the beaver is still in the land 

 and his name is muskrat. In practically 

 everything but size they are the same. 

 Take a muskrat, flatten his tail up and down 

 instead of sidewise, and magnify him, and 

 you have a beaver. Thoreau once said he 

 had found in the Walden woods everything 

 but the Bengal tiger and the Victoria lily, 

 and that he confidently expected to find 

 them sometime. Nothing has better helped 

 me to understand his meaning than to study 

 the muskrat and call him beaver. 



THE BEAVER'S HEIR-AT-LAW 



I recently came across a mound that re- 

 minded me of this afresh. A stream makes 

 its way into an abandoned mill-dam. This 

 has been allowed to fill up, and, for several 

 hundred yards all about it, earth has silted 

 in and formed a swamp. In Pennsylvania 



