Nature, children, as you observe, gave my family a handsome coat. Now no bird can have fine feathers, nor beast a fine fur but men and women desire them for adornment, or possibly to keep themselves warm. So the hunters, finding it a paying business, shoot and trap us till places which once knew the Otter know us no more. Such gentle animals as we are, too. No little girl or boy would care to have a more frolicsome playmate than a young cub Otter. He will romp with you, and play with Dog or Cat and sit up on his hindquarters, and whistle and do even many quaint tricks to make you laugh. To make him happy you must have a little pond in the yard or a large tank, though he will run about the yard or house most of the time with the Dog. Feed him at first on bread and milk, then on fish, though you can train him to do without the latter and eat the "leavings" from the table. Such fun as we Otters that live in the Northern part of the United States and Canada do have in winter. No school-boy enjoys coasting down hill more than we do. Though we live in the water, you may say, and are known as the fastest-swimming quadrupeds, yet, in spite of our short legs, we can run over land tolerably well, too. So we trudge along till we come to a high hill, well covered with snow; up we scramble to the top, lie down flat on our smooth jackets, bend our fore feet backward and, giving ourselves a shove with our hind legs, down we slide head-foremost. Such fun as it is! Not till we get hungry or too tired to jog up the hill any more do we give it up for that day. In summer we enjoy the same sport, too. How? Oh, all we want is a clay-bank with a good muddy surface, and down we go to turn a somersault into the water of the creek below. "Shooting the chutes" you little people would call it, I suppose, though we call it our "slide." Our homes are always on the banks of a stream. We begin to burrow three or four feet below the surface of the water, forming a tunnel which leads to a chamber in the bank high and dry. That is called our den and we line it with grass and live very comfortably. Being a hunted animal our senses are very acute. When on land we are always on the alert and, at the approach of danger, down we go into the water and hide in our dens. After sunset we go out to fish. We beat the surface of the water with our tails and frighten the scaly fellows so that they seek refuge under stones or in holes in the bank. Then we catch our Fish. For a change we eat Crabs, Frogs, and sometimes small birds. [Illustration: From col. Chi. Acad. Sciences. AMERICAN OTTER. 1/4 Life-size. Copyright by Nature Study Pub. Co., 1898, Chicago.] THE AMERICAN OTTER.