So the winter months slipped away. At last spring melted the ice on the pond. Here and there in the black water little brown heads came popping up. They went ploughing towards shore, leaving the rippled water stretching behind. Up the banks scrambled the beavers,—mother beavers and father beavers, big brother beavers and big sister beavers, and all the little beavers who had been babies the year before. Away roamed the fathers up the brook, to have a good time travelling all summer long. The grown-up brothers and sisters began to build dams and houses of their own, while the little fellows wandered into the woods to find their dinners of tender buds and twigs.
—Julia Augusta Swartz.
From “Wilderness Babies,” by permission of Little, Brown & Company.
There’s not a flower that decks the vale,
There’s not a beam that lights the mountain,
There’s not a shrub that scents the gale,
There’s not a wind that stirs the fountain,
But in its use or beauty shows
True love to us, and love undying.