e air; but in
their distress this afternoon they darted downward almost to the ground,
as though appealing for help for their young.

While the school was watching this curious scene the old chief of the
Umatillas came up the cool highway or trail, to go home with Benjamin
after school.

The eagles seemed to know him. As he joined the pitying group, the female
eagle descended as in a spasm of grief, and her wing swept his plume. She
uttered a long, tremulous cry as she passed and ascended to her young.

"She call," said the old chief. "She call me."

"I go," said Benjamin, with a look at his father.

"Yes, go--she call. She call--the God overhead he call. Go!"

A slender young pine ran up beside one of the giant trees, tall and green.
In a moment Benjamin was seen ascending this pine to a point where he
could throw himself upon the smallest of the great trees and grasp the
ladder of the lower dead branches. Up and up he went in the view of all,
until he had reached a height of some hundred and fifty feet.

The eagles wheeled around him, describing higher circles as he ascended.
He reached the young eagles at last, but passed by them. What was he going
to do?

There was a shelf of green boughs above him, which would bear the weight
of a nest. He went up to them at a distance of nearly two hundred feet. He
then began to gather up the fallen sticks of the old nest, and to break
off new sticks and to construct a new nest. The old chief watched him with
pride, and, turning to the master, said:

"Ah-a--that is my boy. He be me. I was he once--it is gone now--what I
was."

When Benjamin had made a nest he descended, and at the peril of his own
life, on the decayed limbs, he rescued the two young eagles that were
hanging with heads downward and open beaks. He carried them up to the new
nest and placed them in it, and began to descend.

But a withered bough that he grasped was too slender for his weight, and
broke. He grasped another, but that too gave way. He tried to drop into
the top of the tall young pine below him, but, in his effort to get into
position to do so, limb after limb of dead wood broke, and he came falling
to the earth, amid the startled looks of the chief and the cries of the
children.

The ground was soft, and his body lay for a time half imbedded in it.

He was senseless, and blood streamed from his nose and reddened his eyes.
The old chief seized his arm and tried to raise him, but the effort