stretched feet touched a slippery, slimy, wriggling body that was just beginning to gather headway.

Quicker than a wink his toes closed about it and his sharp talons sank deep into the trout's flesh. Then up he came, rising out of the Stream like some fabled monster of old, and shaking the water from his feathers in a shower of flying drops. There was nothing leisurely in his movements now. Every thread of muscle in his wings and breast was working with all its might to lift that heavy trout, for it proved to be the largest that the osprey had ever captured, an aged veteran whose hooked jaw had been the gate of death to many and many a smaller fish before his own turn came. went the bird's great pinions till they were straight above him; then down they came, lashing the air like whips. Up again and down, up and down, up and down, harder and faster and fiercer; and little by little he and his victim rose above the Stream till at last they were clear of the tree-tops. Then straight away to the nest in the old pine, where the wife was waiting to make them both welcome.

Up

The Trout Stream was working down to Lake Superior from the spring in the little cedar swamp among the hills, through the hardwood forest, past the pine ridges, and across the huckleberry plains; and it was seeing things along the way. Chiefly it was seeing life. It was marvelous how many living creatures there were in it, and over it, and under it, and all about it, from the clams hidden away in its sandy bed to the great bald eagle who floated far up in the blue, and who now and then came down and robbed the osprey of a well-earned dinner. And the eagle was not the only highwayman among them. A large proportion of the inhabitants appeared to be principally engaged in robbing the others of either their dinners or their lives, and tragedies were very frequent along the Trout Stream. The trout himself, when the osprey first saw him, had just swallowed a herring, who, in his day, had devoured a whole multitude of still smaller fishes and water animals.

One summer there was a big green caterpillar who lived in a birch tree close beside the Stream. When the autumn came he wove a silken coffin and sealed himself up in it so tightly that you would have thought he did not expect ever again to see the light of day. When the leaves fell from the birch tree he fell with them, and all winter long he lay under the snow, waiting the call to life that was sure to come with the spring, and in the mean time growing and changing and making ready for a glorious transformation. His resurrection trumpet sounded at last, and he cut a hole in one end of his casket and crept out, not a caterpillar at all, but a marvelous luna moth with great pale green wings, as fair and beautiful and spirit-like a creature as ever flitted through the vernal woods. For a night or two he was happy in the moonlight, and then the Stream saw another tragedy, for, as he alighted for a moment on the ground, a tiny shrew, one of the smallest but most pugnacious of all the fourfooted people in the forest, blundered upon him and made an end of him. That such a slow, dull, half-blind, earth-bound animal should have been permitted to take the life of that wonderful moth is hard to understand. One could scarcely pity him when, only an hour later, he himself was killed and eaten by a mink. And yet life may have been as sweet to the shrew as to the moth. These things be a mystery, and we can only guess and wonder at their meaning.

But it was not all tragedy that the Trout Stream saw. There was much of pleasure and happiness as wellinnocent happiness, that cost no one anything, and that sprang from health and strength and sunshine and work and love, just as ours does. Take the osprey again as an example. In most of the relations of life he was a model bird. As a husband he was loyal and devoted, doing his full share in the building of the nest, bringing home generous supplies of food, and even taking a turn now and then at keeping the eggs warm while his wife stretched her wings. They were very fond of