The Indians consider beaver flesh a delicacy, and they prefer to bake it with the skin on, as our gipsies roast the hedgehog. It is a heavy meat, much like pork, hard to digest.
The author already mentioned tamed several of them, and he got them to answer to their names and to follow him about like dogs. They were, he said, very fond of being petted and fondled, creeping into the laps of the Indian women and standing on their hind legs to be caressed. They lived indoors with the women and children during the winter, and if these were absent for any length of time, the beavers quite fretted after them. So domesticated did they become that they particularly enjoyed rice and plum pudding, and, indeed, shared generally the food of the women. The cry of a beaver cub is very like that of an infant.
"The musk-rat plied its mason's trade, And tier by tier its mud walls laid."
The musk-rat is a small kind of beaver, and great numbers of the skins are imported into England. It constructs huts like its larger relative but of a simpler style, the openings to them being under the water. There is also an animal nearly as large as a common beaver which was included in the same family, and called a coypu, inhabiting the rivers and streams of South America. Furs of coypu are sold as otter skins.
"Ask now the beasts and they shall teach thee," and from the beaver and its works we can indeed learn what persistent, cheerful industry can accomplish. Our poet, Coleridge, said, "If the idle are described as _killing_ time, the methodical man may be justly said to call it into life and moral being, while he makes it the distinct object not only of the consciousness, but of the conscience." Perhaps the latter part of this sentence may seem obscure to some of you, my readers. To kill time means evidently to lose all count of it, to be "unmindful of the fleeting hours." But if the conscience is roused, and we are imbued with a sense of our responsibility with regard to every day, every hour we live, each hour becomes instinct with possibilities, with the opportunity and power of developing the gifts that we have, the talents entrusted to us, not only with a view to self-improvement and personal enrichment, but with an eye on the Master and His work. "Fellow-workers with Christ" in the redemption of this world,--how great a calling!