parent builds a nest of reeds, often displaying much taste in its arrangement. The roof, flooring and sides are disposed with all the care of an expert builder, poor timbers being rejected, and they have been seen with the flooring weighed down with stones to hold it in place, while the roof could be set in position. The home is generally oval, with an opening entirely through it, in the centre of which the eggs of the female are placed, the male assuming charge directly, aerating them with its fins, driving the young fish back to the nest when they are yet too young to leave, repelling all invaders, and indeed not hesitating to attack fish of large size, driving them off by the mere impetuosity of its assault.

The common sun-fish of our ponds is a faithful guardian of its young, building an apartment among the growing reeds by pushing them together on each side; and in the center, perhaps under the beautiful canopy of a water lily, the eggs are laid and watched with great devotion until the young come out and are large enough to look out for themselves.

The cat-fish forms a rude nest among the gravel, and is often observed swimming slowly along, surrounded by a bewhiskered flock of young. The young of the lumpfish also recognize the parent and follow, giving rise to the common name "hen and chickens." The young of the sea-horse recognize the male, and are carried about in its marsupium, or pouch, until they are large enough to leave their home.

The striped dace erect a pretentious home for their young, working in pairs. A spot selected, the sand is carefully cleared away, and it being arranged to suit their fancy the fish swim away, soon returning each with a stone in its mouth. This is kept up and the stones dropped until a flooring has been laid, upon which the first deposit of eggs is placed; upon these another layer of little pebbles is placed, and so on until a cone-shaped pile, perhaps eighteen inches high, is the result, and about and through the crevices of this castle the young dace find abundant protection. The lamprey eel erects a home in a similar manner, only in their case the mound is larger, sometimes being three feet at the base. The

sucker has been observed also building a nest very like this.

In watching young fish from some concealed spot, we are frequently reminded of a company of children at play. Now two or more rush at each other fiercely, stop suddenly, and then dart off in a game of chase "hide and seek." Again we see the young herring darting out of the water, leaping over bits of floating straw, one after the other, in a veritable game of "leap-frog."

One of the most interesting of all the nest-builders is the Antennarias, a little fish that makes its home among the floating weed that makes up the so-called Saragasso Sea. The nest is built of bits of the vine-like alga, bound in and out in a network, until it resembles in size and appearance a base ball. Around it the fish places invisible bands of a gelatinous secretion taken from its body. Within the ball the eggs are found attached to the reed. The Antennarias is a wonderful mimic of its surroundings, resembling in exact color the weed, a rich olive green. From its head and fins hang numbers of curious barbels that wave to and fro in quaint imitation of the ends of the sea weed. The little fish is often seen lying upon the surface of the weed, and this mimicry is a sure protection from the sea-birds that wander over the submerged tract.

From these few instances it will be seen that among the so-called lower animals there exists feeling, emotions, and shall we not say hopes akin to those of man, differing only in degree?- Our Continent.

OLLAND, CLIVE, an English novelist and playwright; born at Bournemouth, Hampshire, April 23, 1866. He is the author of the plays The Heart of the Geisha (1901); and The Heart of O Hana San (1902). He is well known as a con

tributor to American and English periodicals. His novels include The Golden Hawk (1888); My Japanese Wife (1895); Mousme (1896); The Lure of Fame (1896); An Egyptian Coquette (1897); Marcelle of the Latin Quarter (1898); A Japanese Romance (1900); The Vortex (1903); and A Japanese Princess (1904).

THE VILLAGE AMONG THE HILLS.

Twenty-five years ago, as the sun was sinking, reddening the rocky face of Hondalsnut, and turning the blue shadows to purple, I, Eric Probst, entered Vossevangen.

In those days but few strangers came to Norway to roam amongst their fiords and hills, and still fewer reached the tiny village, which boasted but a farmhouse or two, and a score or so of cottages of lesser size. And the few travellers who came stayed, perhaps, a day or two to fish in the lake, and then passed on out of our lives. I was not born under the shadow of the hills on which the snow rested in winter and spring and autumn, but no matter; I came amongst them to forget a sorrow and a crime, the bitterness of which was nigh unto death, and the simple-hearted people, whose lives were mostly bounded by the peaks which shut their village in, and the turn the valley took a few miles distant, crept into the aching, empty chamber of my heart, and I lived with them, and taught their children, and in return they loved me with a true love, and nursed and tended me when I fell sick.

Hans Olsen was a ruddy-faced, flaxen-haired little fellow of two when Mariae Brun had a daughter, who in after years was to exercise so great control over his life. No one could say that Hans was a weakling, but when I looked first into his blue eyes I knew that Gretchen Olsen had brought no ordinary boy into the world. The child had a soul from the day upon which he began to lisp his mother's name and to hear and know her voice. Some, I know, say that the soul is co-existent with life. I cannot say, but what I mean by "soul" is

the power to exercise the Divine heritage of choice between evil and good. The possession of a soul- an abstract quality unexercised—has never saved a man or woman since sin entered the world, and never will.

Hans was no ordinary boy, of that I was certain, and I used to muse upon his future, as I sat in the sun in front of the cottage door, or when I walked, book in hand, along the borders of the lake in which, when the sun sank low, the mountain-tops were wont to glass themselves, and the dark blue shadows to rest lovingly.

Strangely enough, I finished the last mile of my weary tramp up from Bergen, and entered the village, as the sun

was fading from rose to grey, on the very July night that Hans was born. Two strangers entered that night the little cottage which nestled amid the pines on the hill slope above the lake - one to open blue, baby eyes upon an unknown world, and the other to shake the dust of the day's journey from his feet, and to commence to shut his heart and bar his memory to all that he had learned, in more than thirty years, of the world which lay outside the valley.

I knocked at the first cottage to which I came, for I was weary, and that was Peter Olsen's, who himself came to the door.

"Is there an inn?" I asked.

"None," he replied, taking my hand in his.

My face must have fallen, for he hastened to add, as if in excuse, "Few travellers come here, sir, and those that do have a welcome, rest, and shelter, such as it is, in any cottage hereabouts, or at the farmhouse, if there is more than one."

Come in," he said, and presently I will get you food," and I, too tired to hunt in the gathering darkness for other hospitality, gladly allowed him to draw me in, and place me in a chair near the fire, which burned on the open stone hearth.

"Tread softly," he begged. And from that, and his look of anxiety, I gathered that there was illness in the house.

When I was comfortably seated he left me, and my tired eyes must have closed in sleep, for when I opened

centre of And the

them again, on the table, which stood in the the room, was a lamp, bread, cheese, and milk. man who had befriended me was standing before me, and I thought that I saw tears swimming in his eyes.

"To-night," he said, "as the sun set and as your steps turned into the valley God gave me a son. And now we will eat, and give thanks. It is well that you came to keep me company in my joy."

After we had finished the meal we sat far into the night talking, and Peter Olsen told me about himself and his wife Gretchen, and, when he had done, asked me questions about myself not inquisitively, however, but with an undisguised interest in one who had seen sights he had never seen, and heard things he had never heard. Only the faintest echoes, wafted by some stray traveller like myself, or the packman, who came at irregular quarterly intervals, reached Vossevangen in those days from the outer world. I told him in the flickering firelight for he had said when supper was done, “Oil is dear, sir, and we can talk by the light of the fire," and had at my assent extinguished the little lamp — all that I could tell to any man of my life and the dead past I sought to bury out of sight and memory for ever more.

Peter Olsen asked few questions, save those concerning outward things, putting none of those embarrassing ones that nine men out of ten would have done under similar circumstances. All that I cared to tell him of that world of which he knew so little, of its sights and sounds, and doings and sufferings, he listened to eagerly enough, with his hands on his knees and body bent forward, but a sound in the chamber above would recall him from the enchanted land, and he would look at me askance, and then rise up and creep, with the tender, appealing clumsiness of a strong, big man treading softly, to the bottom of the narrow little closed-in stairway. Hearing nothing to alarm him, he would nod and smile, and then return to his seat, and, speaking softly, bid me continue.

We sat talking through the long night, until the gray dawn came with its chill, and then, at sunrise, the woman who had watched by the side of the mother and child in the upper room came down.