THE COUNTRY.


rudeness to allow himself to be looked upon.
Yet before he dives he will turn a cold, small
eye in the direction of the canoe, and a month
afterwards the memory of that stare will make
a man shudder and quite forget that the dull,
dark creature may have had any interests or
pleasures of his own in the proprietorship of
the creek.
 Yet here and there an intruder does appre-
 ciate him; one traveller, coming upon him
 silently in a little lily-crowded cove, declares
 him to be a "very honest and worthy saurian
 of good repute." And he falls to describing
 the house of his saurian, with a nice sense of
 his own smallness and his friend's greatness.
 He is a very Boswell for details. "It is di-
 vided into apartments," he says, "little subsidi-
 ary bays which are scolloped out by lily-pads
 according to the sinuous fantasies of their
 growth. My saurian, when he desires to sleep,
 may lie down anywhere; he will find marvellous
 mosses for his mattress beneath hini; his sheets
will be white lily-petals; and the green disks of
lily-pads will straightway embroider themselves