But maybe it wouldn't be your own mamma that would be with you; for lots of sad things happen to beaver people, and when one little beaver's mother dies another mother beaver will take care of him, and all his brothers and sisters besides! Mr. Mills tells in that most interesting book of his about how one day a mother beaver was killed by a hunter who thought he didn't have anything better to do than kill poor little beavers; and the very next evening a lady beaver, who already had four babies of her own, travelled a quarter of a mile with them to the house of her dead neighbor and stayed there and brought all the little orphans up!
The crayfish is a thing you've got to take seriously if you want to get the most out of it. Huxley says that a thorough study of a crayfish is almost a whole course in zoology. Think of going to school to a crayfish! But you'd enjoy it, I'm sure. For just look—and these are only a few of the interesting things you will find in Huxley's famous book on "The Crayfish":
How they swim backward (no doubt you know this already), and how they walk on the bottom of the water.
Why they seem to know the points of the compass—for they prefer rivers that run north and south.
Why they are most active toward evening.
Where they spend the winter.
Why they eat their old clothes.
How early in the spring you may expect to find them.
When they hatch their eggs and how the mother crayfish uses her tail for a nursery.
In what respect they resemble moths.
How they chew their meals with their feet and work their jaws like a camel from side to side—only more so!
How they grow by fits and starts, and what this has to do with the way they change their clothes.
How you can tell the age of a crayfish. (You don't do it by looking at its teeth. You couldn't see its teeth anyway, because they are in its stomach.)
And all this in less than the first fifty pages of a book, which has more than 350.
One of the most famous of the crab family, not only on account of his part in agriculture, but because of his funny ways, is the robber-crab. You should read about the wild life of adventure some of these crabs lead—regular Robinson Crusoes who get wrecked on islands far away from home and build houses there and shift for themselves in many ingenious ways, just as the human Robinson Crusoe did. Kingsley's "[Madam How and Lady Why]" has some interesting pages about them; and so has Darwin's "Voyage Around the World."
Of the many things that have been written about beavers the following are among the most interesting: The story of the beaver in "Stories of Adventure," edited by Edward Everett Hale; "The Forest Engineer," by T. W. Higginson, in Johonnott's "Glimpses of the Animal World"; "How the Beaver Builds His House," in "The Animal Story Book," edited by Lang; "The Builders," in Lang's "Ways of Wood Folks"; and "The House in the Water," by Roberts.
The most interesting book of all on beavers, however, is "The Beaver World," by Mills, referred to in this chapter. I have not told you one-half of the remarkable things you will find about them in this book.
One of the most curious is about how a beaver sometimes gets his breath in the winter time. He may have to travel quite a distance under the ice, and one good breath has to last him to the end of the journey.
"But does he hold his breath all this time? How can he?"
He can't. He just uses the same breath over again. See how he does it. The Mills book tells.
Look up the muskrat and compare his ways with those of the beaver.
In the "Country Life Reader" you will find a graphic description of one of the perils of life for the beavers and their cousins the muskrats; namely in attacks by the great horned owl.
CITY LIFE AMONG THE FLAMINGOES
We don't have to go to Florida to get this bird's-eye view of a flamingo city. It is one of the habitat groups in the American Museum of Natural History in New York, and reproduces perfectly the architecture and the social life of these interesting people.