Good ones cost $100 apiece, but cheaper ones can be obtained from the bear, mink, and red fox and Arctic Hare.

This money I got by cleaning gentlemen's shoes and drawing boots, by catching musk-rats and minks, raising potatoes and carrots, &c. and by fishing in the night, and at odd spells.

So he told them that perhaps, if all went well, he might take up a companion industry, being nothing more nor less than trying to raise mink or otter in captivity.

The mink we usually took in deadfalls, smaller, of course, than the ones we used for the bears.

The twin pads of the mink were clearly defined upon the snow-covered ice which bordered the tumbling creek, and at times the tracks diverged in exploration of the recesses of some brush heap.

Little difference made it to the mink whether his prey were bird or woodmouse.

About the sables came contrast again of the skins of silver fox, alternating with those of the otter, and about all this glorious center piece, set at right angles, were arranged the skins of the marten, the blue fox, the mink, the otter and the beaver.

But the old order had changed, and a day had come when the dike had been cut through, the lazy water let out into the surrounding flats, and the old waterway left to the willows and the wild-flowers, the mink and the musk-rat.

A mink brought seven dollars, a musk-rat thirty cents.

We engaged a couple of window tables at the Cafe des Beaux Minks realizing that though we were not in the money we were still on the track.

If anybody mentions Mink's to me I am liable to throw a foaming fit and fall in it.

It was also a great pleasure for the children to have the hunters, returning from a successful trip, open their fur packs and spread out before them the rich furs and tell them stories about these animalsthe silver fox, the otter, beavers, minks, martens, ermines, and sometimes even about great bears and wolves, whose skin they had often had.

The cache, poorly contrived by inexperienced hands, however, had been discovered and openedby musk rats, mink and squirrel.

The beaver cut his timber With patient teeth that day, The minks were fish-wards, and the cows Surveyors of highway, When Keezar sat on the hillside Upon his cobbler's form, With a pan of coals on either hand To keep his waxed-ends warm.

This pack, he says, consisted of six large and two small beavers, two otters, six martins, ninety muskrats, and four minks.

The old mink game.

Pictures by Norv Mink.

MINK, NORV.

Every thing was of home manufacturefor there was not a store in Kentucky,and the most expensive domestic products seem to have been the hats, made of native fur, mink, coon, fox, wolf, and beaver.

The prime furs were mink, coon, muskrat, wildcat, and beaver.

There are also a clean race of frogs and tortoises, and a few mussels in it; muskrats and minks leave their traces about it, and occasionally a travelling mud-turtle visits it.

There were no human signs there; here a woodcock had peppered the mud with little holes, probing for worms; there a raccoon had picked his way; yonder a lynx had left the great padded mark of its foot, doubtless watching for yonder mink nosing us from the bank of the still pool below.

He had left Brave some distance back, digging at a hole in a stump where a mink had taken refuge, and he had not yet come up.

" "It is not the season for hunting now," said George; "but in the fall there are lots of ducks, pigeons, squirrels, and turkeys, and in the winter the woods are full of minks, and now and then a bear or deer; and the swamps are just the places to kill muskrats.

Last winter we lost a good many minks, when, if we had had an instrument like this, we could have secured them easily enough.