Beaver are mature the third summer of their lives, and at this time they commonly leave the parental home, pair, and begin life for themselves. There are stories to the effect that the parents of the youthful home-builders accompany the children to new scenes, help them select a building-site, and assist in the construction of the new house and dam. After this the parents return home. This probably is occasionally true. Anyway I once saw this program fairly well carried out, and at another time in a limited manner. The beaver is practical, peaceful, and industrious. He builds a permanent house and keeps it clean and in repair. Beside it he stores food-supply for the long winter. He takes thought for the morrow. These and other commendable characteristics give him a place of honor among the hordes of homeless, hand-to-mouth folk of the wild. During the winter he has but little to do except bathe and eat his two or three meals a day from the food he has stored in the autumn. Towards spring, when his wild neighbors are lean, hungry, and cold, he is fat and comfortable. In the spring he emerges from the house, but then his only work is occasionally to cut a twig for food. In the summer he plays tourist. He visits other colonies, and wanders up and down streams, going miles from home. In the late summer or early autumn he returns, makes repairs, and harvests food for winter. The beaver is a valuable conservationist, but there are localities in which he cannot be tolerated. Although dead wood is rarely cut by the beaver, many a homesteader has been disturbed by his cutting off and carrying away green fence posts. Recently beaver have returned to a few localities and got themselves into bad repute by felling fruit trees. Occasionally, too, in the West, they have lost caste by persistently damming an irrigation-ditch and diverting the water, despite the fact that a court has given both the title and the right to this water to some one else a mile or so down the ditch. In all logging operations, beaver never fail--where there is opportunity--to cut trees upstream and float them down with the current. Tree-cutting is an interesting phase of beaver life. A beaver will go waddling dully from the water to a tree he is about to cut down. All will look about for enemies; one may be wise enough--but the majority will not do so--to look upward to see if the tree about to be felled is entangled at the top. All appear to choose a comfortable place on which to squat or sit while cutting.