the brook and its tributaries, most ravenously. If you are patient, fortunate, and the wind is right you may at dusk get a glimpse of the weasel-like head of one lifted above the bank as he sniffs the breeze for game and enemies. In that light his fur will look black though it is really a pretty shade of brown, but you will not fail to see the white streak which runs from his chin downward. But, though you may not see the animal himself you cannot, if there is snow on the ground, fail to see his slender, aristocratic track with its clutching claws, for the mink is a desperate hunter and always hungry. All is fish that comes to his net,--trout, turtles, toads, snails, bugs, or anything he can find in the brook that seems in the least edible. The semi-aquatic life of the enchanted region is sadly destructive of other life, and I feel little pity for the mink or the weasel, sleek and beautiful wild creatures though they are, if they in turn fall into the steel jaws which the trapper sets for them in the narrow passes all up and down the stream. It is the common lot of the woods and only the swiftest and most crafty can hope to escape it. The mink devour the trout, and they, seemingly innocent and beautiful enough to have come up, water sprites, from that unknown underground world whence well the crystal waters in which they live, are as greedy and irresponsible in their diet as the mink themselves. Like them, when hungry they will devour the young of their own species and smack their lips over the feast. The trout will eat anything that looks to be alive either in the water or on the surface. I often amuse myself in summer by biting small chunks out of an apple and dropping them in, to see the trout swallow them as ravenously as if they had suddenly become vegetarians and had all the zeal of new converts. What the Jamaica ginger preparation of the brook world is I don’t know, unless it is watercress. That grows, green and peppery, all up and down the brook the year through. Perhaps the trout go from my green apple luncheon over to that and thus join the remedy to the disease.