rrupt the fugitive. He swam as well as the
muskrat,--perhaps faster, indeed, with a darting, eel-like, deadly
swiftness. But the stream at this point had widened to a breadth of
twelve or fifteen yards,--and this was the little muskrat's salvation.
The mink was afraid to follow her to such a distance from the
air-space. He knew that by the time he overtook her, and fixed his
teeth in her throat, he would be fairly winded; and then, with no
breathing-hole at hand, he would die terribly, bumping up against the
clear ice and staring madly through at the free air for which his
lungs were agonizing. His fierce heart failed him, and he turned back
to the air-space under the bank. But the sight of the muskrat had
whetted his appetite, and when he came to the muskrat house in the
alders, he swam down and thrust his head inside the water-gate. He
even, indeed, went half-way in; but soon instinct, or experience, or
remembered instruction, told him that the distance to the air-chamber
was too great for him. He had no more fancy to be drowned in the
muskrat's winding black tunnel, than under the clear daylight of the
ice; so he turned away, and with red, angry eyes resumed his journey
up-stream.

The little muskrat, seeing that her enemy was disheartened, went on
cheerfully to the clam-bed. Here she clawed up from the oozy bottom
and devoured almost enough clams to make a meal for a full-grown man.
But she took longer over her meal than the man would, thereby saving
herself from an otherwise imminent indigestion. Each bivalve, as she
got it, she would carry up to the air-space among the stones,
selecting a tussock of grass on which she could rest half out of the
water. And every time, before devouring her prize, she would
carefully, though somewhat impatiently, cleanse her face of the mud
and dead leafage which seemed to be an inseparable concomitant of her
digging. When she had eaten as many clams as she could stuff into her
little body, she hastened back to join her mate in the safe nest over
the water-gate.

In the upper world the winter was a severe one, but of all its
bitterness the muskrats knew nothing, save by the growing thickness of
the ice that sheltered them. As Bitter Creek shrank to normal, winter
level, and the strong ice sank in mid-channel, the air-space along
shore increased till they had a spacious, covered corridor in which to
disport themselves. Food was all about them--an unlimited abundance of
lily-roots a