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This is the American black bear, who is looking so lively and seemingly inviting the young folks to have a romp, which they will be only too willing to join in. The black bear is of a timid disposition, and seldom attacks man except in self-defense. The female bear is a most affectionate mother, and many stories are related showing her care and love for her young, and her sorrow and mournful cries when any evil befalls them. On one occasion a black bear with her two cubs was pursued across the ice by some armed sailors. At first she urged her cubs to increased speed, but finding her pursuers gaining upon them, she carried, pushed, and pitched them, alternately, forward, until she effected their escape from her pursuers.

Moreover, in my own experience, the further secret, whatever it is, is by no means wholly joyful and not at all light-hearted. It seems to me at such times that it is rather solemn, profound, serious, difficult, and sad. But it is not a heavy or depressing sadness-indeed, the thought is at once hopeful and above everything beautiful. It has nothing that is called sentimental about it. It is not full of rest and content and peace; it is rather strong and stern, though it is gentle too; but it is the kind of gentle strength which faces labour and hardness, not troubled by them, and indeed knowing that only thus can the secret be attained. There is no hint of easy, childlike happiness about the mood; there is a happiness in it, but it is an old and a wise happiness that has learned how to wait and is fully prepared for endurance. There is no fretfulness in it, no chafing over dreams unrealised, no impatience or disappointment. But it does not speak of an untroubled bliss--rather of a deep, sad and loving patience, which expects no fulfilment, no easy satisfaction of desire.

The Surinam toad, represented in No. 8, is also the possessor of one of the strangest nurseries known to science. It lives in the dense tropical forests of Guiana and Brazil, and is a true water-haunter. But at the breeding season the female undergoes a curious change of integument. The skin on her back grows pulpy, soft, and jelly-like. She lays her eggs in the water: but as soon as she has laid them, her lord and master plasters them on to her impressionable back with his feet, so as to secure them from all assaults of enemies. Every egg is pressed separately into a bed of the soft skin, which soon closes over it automatically, thus burying each in a little cell or niche, where it undergoes its further development. The tadpoles pass through their larval stage within the cell, and then hop out, in the four-legged condition. As soon as they have gone off to shift for themselves, the mother toad finds herself with a ragged and honeycombed skin, which must be very uncomfortable. So she rubs the remnant of it off against stones or the bark of trees, and re-develops a similar back afresh at the next breeding season.

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