Yet the ducks just couldn't take it into their families either, for what else do you think it does? It suckles its young, like a pussy-cat! Talk about your sensations; it made the hit of the season--this Animal X from the Antipodes. The learned men of London town, they looked him up and they looked him down, and they came to the same conclusion, at first, that the old gentleman did when he saw the dromedary. They said: "They _ain't_ no such animal!" (Only, of course, being learned men, they used good grammar.) They really did say that in effect, and you can't blame them; for, as if to complete the joke, the first member of the duck-billed mole family to move in scientific society came in like a Christmas turkey; in other words, he was a stuffed specimen. So the men of science said he wasn't _real_ at all; that he was just made up of the parts of _other_ animals. But being true men of science, after all, they finally began looking up the stranger's record among his neighbors back in Australia, and they found there actually are living creatures in that land of strange creatures, just like that specimen, and that they live in burrows which they dig in the banks of the streams. [Illustration: COUSIN ECHIDNA The echidna--you can see one in the New York Zoo--is closely related to our duck-billed friend and is also a native of Australia. It uses that long, tapering nose and those claws to burrow for the ants on which it lives.] Still the scientists didn't know what to call this paradox of the animal kingdom; so they named him just that--paradoxicus, _Ornythoryncus paradoxicus_. A little Greek boy, without having to look it up in a dictionary, would have told us that "ornythoryncus" means "bird-billed"; for it's like those Greek picture words that always told their own story to the little Greeks. As for "paradox" if you don't know what that means, look it up in the dictionary and then look at the _Ornythoryncus paradoxicus_, and you'll understand. IV. THE BEAVERS Of course you wouldn't like to be a duck-billed mole--nobody would, but I always thought it would be rather nice to be a beaver. The beaver is, in many ways, the most remarkable of all the water people that help make the lands that give us bread. [Illustration: BEAVERS AT WORK AND AT PLAY Whether he's working because he is more industrious than those beavers in the water or because it's recess time with them, the young beaver gnawing the tree seems to be having quite as good a time practising his profession as the others do in playing about.] But it is not alone for the amount of work he does that I admire Mr. Beaver so much; it is for his intelligent, not to say brilliant, way of doing it. Suppose, for instance, you had to build a house out in the water, the way our great, great-grandparents, the lake-dwellers, did, to protect yourself from enemies and for other reasons. And then suppose you didn't have any _tools_; nothing but a pair of paws and a set of teeth. Could you do it?