As animal life goes, that of the beaver stands among the best. His life is full of industry and is rich in repose. He is home-loving and avoids fighting. His lot is cast in poetic places. The beaver has a rich birthright, though born in a windowless hut of mud. Close to the primeval place of his birth the wild folk of both woods and water meet and often mingle. Around are the ever-changing and never-ending scenes and silences of the water or the shore. Beaver grow up with the many-sided wild, playing amid the brilliant flowers and great boulders, in the piles of driftwood and among the fallen logs on the forest's mysterious edge. They learn to swim and slide, to dive quickly and deeply from sight, to sleep, and to rest moveless in the sunshine; ever listening to the strong, harmonious stir of wind and water, living with the stars in the sky and the stars in the pond; beginning serious life when brilliant clouds of color enrich autumn's hills; helping to harvest the trees that wear the robes of gold, while the birds go by for the southland in the reflective autumn days. If Mother Nature should ever call me to live upon another planet, I could wish that I might be born a beaver, to inhabit a house in the water. Our Friend the Beaver One bright autumn afternoon I peered down into a little meadow by a beaver pond. This meadow was grass-covered and free from willows. In it seven or eight beaver were at work along a new canal. Each kept his place and appeared to have a section in which he did his digging. For more than half an hour I watched them clawing out the earth and grass-roots and lifting it out in double handfuls and piling it in an orderly line along the canal-bank. While I was watching a worker at one end of this line, two others clinched in a fight. The fighters made no sound except a subdued guttural mumbling as they rolled about in a struggle. The other workers, to my astonishment, paid not the slightest attention to this fight, but each attended to his own affairs. After two or three minutes the belligerents broke away; one squatted down breathing heavily, while the other, with bloody tail, dragged himself off and plunged into the pond. This was the first beaver fight that I had ever seen.