'Till he came unto a streamlet In the middle of the forest To a streamlet still and tranquil That had overflowed its margin, To a dam made by the beavers, To a pond of quiet water, Where knee-deep the trees were standing, Where the water-lilies floated, Where the rushes waved and whispered. --_Longfellow: "Hiawatha."_ WATER FARMERS WHO HELP MAKE LAND As we all spend more or less time in the water in August I thought it would be a good idea to take as the subject of this chapter the lives of the water farmers. Some of these--the crayfish and the turtle, for example--you know well, and everybody has heard of the beaver family, but they will all bear closer acquaintance. I know, for I've spent a good deal of time among them. I. THE TURTLE PEOPLE Every boy who has tramped along creeks and ponds knows the mud-turtle. We ought to call him a tortoise, perhaps, but the name turtle is more common. I don't know why; perhaps because it's a little easier to say. Strictly speaking, the name "turtle" is applied to the members of the family that have flippers, and spend nearly all their time in the water; while the tortoises are the ones that have feet and put in much of their time on land. (And then, of course, there are the tortoises of fables that run races with hares, and so teach us not to be too confident of ourselves because we think we are cleverer than some other people.) [Illustration: A HAWKSBILL TURTLE] The common box-turtle of the United States you'll meet in the woods in the evening and early morning, wandering about looking for something to eat. He spends practically all his time on land in Summer; and in the Winter, all his time in bed. As soon as cold weather comes on he digs a hole in the ground, or scoops out a place under some brush, and turns in. But the box-turtle--he's really a tortoise--is what some of his relatives would call a "landlubber," no doubt, for many of the tortoises who live in the sea rarely leave it; as if they had half a mind to go back and be only flipper people, as the ancestors of both the turtles and the tortoises must have been; since all life is supposed to have begun in the sea. All the tortoises of temperate regions dig in for the Winter, but one Southern member of the family makes his home in a dugout throughout the year. He's called the "gopher" turtle. The gopher turtles are natives of Florida, and live in pairs in burrows. Other members of the turtle tribe do not pair, but there's one time in their lives when both land and water turtles dig into the soil and that's when they are laying their eggs. The females scoop out hollows with their hind legs, kicking up the dirt, first with one leg and then with the other. But they're as careful of the dirt they dig out as a beaver is when he digs a canal. They scrape it up in a little ridge all around the hole. What for? Just watch. HOW MOTHER TURTLE "TAMPS" HER NEST