20 ROMANCE OF THE BEAVER 
into the water. Often a great colony of many 
members is lodged in one house. But, if they be 
incommoded by the narrowness of the place, the 
younger ones depart of their own accord and con- 
struct houses for themselves.” Allowing for slight 
inaccuracies due to translation, this is a remarkably 
accurate description and shows what careful 
observers were those sturdy, self-sacrificing priests 
who did so much for Canada in her early develop- 
ment. It is all the more extraordinary when we 
consider how natural history subjects were treated 
in those days. 
The inside of a beaver’s lodge is simplicity 
itself. There is only one chamber, unless possibly 
two lodges being built adjoining one another may 
have the rooms connecting. However, this is a 
condition I have never seen. The size varies, 
according to conditions, some being as much as 
twelve feet or more in diameter,* but an ordinary 
house built to accommodate a family of six would 
have a room about four or five feet long and 
rather less in width, with the ceiling at the highest 
point a little over two feet. The ceiling is fairly 
smooth, all projecting sticks and roots being care- 
fully cut off. There is, indeed, every evidence to 
show that the interior is really made and finished 
after the wall or the mound has been more or 
less completed. The fact that the sticks are so 
* Mills gives the size of the chambers as being “from three to 
twenty feet across.” 
