. The stream was
broad and shallow at this part, and you could see the stones and
gravel at the bottom, and millions of baby fishes, and a sort of
skating-spiders walking about on the top of the water. Denny said the
water must be ice for them to be able to walk on it, and this showed we
were getting near the North Pole. But Oswald had seen a kingfisher by
the wood, and he said it was an ibis, so this was even.

When Oswald had had as much poetry as he could bear he said, 'Let's be
beavers and make a dam.' And everybody was so hot they agreed joyously,
and soon our clothes were tucked up as far as they could go and our legs
looked green through the water, though they were pink out of it.

Making a dam is jolly good fun, though laborious, as books about beavers
take care to let you know.

Dicky said it must be Canada if we were beavers, and so it was on the
way to the Polar system, but Oswald pointed to his heated brow, and
Dicky owned it was warm for Polar regions. He had brought the ice-axe
(it is called the wood chopper sometimes), and Oswald, ever ready and
able to command, set him and Denny to cut turfs from the bank while we
heaped stones across the stream. It was clayey here, or of course dam
making would have been vain, even for the best-trained beaver.

When we had made a ridge of stones we laid turfs against them--nearly
across the stream, leaving about two feet for the water to go
through--then more stones, and then lumps of clay stamped down as hard
as we could. The industrious beavers spent hours over it, with only one
easy to eat cake in. And at last the dam rose to the level of the bank.
Then the beavers collected a great heap of clay, and four of them lifted
it and dumped it down in the opening where the water was running. It did
splash a little, but a true-hearted beaver knows better than to mind a
bit of a wetting, as Oswald told Alice at the time. Then with more clay
the work was completed. We must have used tons of clay; there was quite
a big long hole in the bank above the dam where we had taken it out.

When our beaver task was performed we went on, and Dicky was so hot he
had to take his jacket off and shut up about icebergs.

I cannot tell you about all the windings of the stream; it went through
fields and woods and meadows, and at last the banks got steeper and
higher, and the trees overhead darkly arched their mysterious branches,
and we felt like the princes in a fairy tale who go out to