“I don’t know much about that fellow,” answered Uncle Andy.  “Now you see him, and now you don’t.  Mostly you don’t; and, when you do, as likely as not it’s only his snaky black head, with its sharp dagger of a bill, stuck up out of the water to keep track of you.  He’s most unsociable.  If anyone tells you he knows all about a loon, you wink to yourself and pretend you are not listening.  But I’ll tell you who do know something about old Dagger Bill—­the Water Babies.

“Who’re the Water Babies?” demanded the Babe.

“Why don’t you know that?  The little muskrats, of course, that live in the warm, dry, dark nest under the dome of their mud house, out in the water—­the house with its doors so far under water that no one can get into it without diving and swimming.”

“It must be cozy and awfully safe,” said the Babe, who began to want a place like that himself.

“Yes, fine!” agreed Uncle Andy.  “And safe from everything but the mink; and if he came in by one door, there was always another door open for them to get out by, so quick that the mink could never see their tails.

“Old Dagger Bill, of course, could never get into the house of the Water Babies, for all his wonderful swimming and diving, because he was so big—­as big as a goose.  But, as a rule, he wouldn’t want to bother the Water Babies.  Fish were much more to Dagger Bill’s taste than young muskrat; and he could swim so fast under water that few fish ever escaped him, once he got after them.

“This summer, however, things were different at Long Pond.  Hitherto it had fairly swarmed with fish—­lake trout, suckers, chub, red fins, and so on.  But that spring some scoundrel had dynamited the waters for the sake of the big lake trout.  Few fish had survived the outrage.  And even so clever a fisherman as Dagger Bill would have gone hungry most of the time had he not been clever enough to vary his bill of fare.

“‘If we can’t have all the bread we want,’ he said to the family, ’we must try to get along on cake!’”

“Dagger Bill might get bread from some camp,” interrupted the Babe thoughtfully, being a matter-of-fact child.  “But what could he know about cake, Uncle Andy?”

“Oh, come on!  You know what I mean!” protested Uncle Andy, aggrieved at the Babe’s lack of a sense of humor.  “You’re too particular, you are! You know bread meant fish with Dagger Bill—­and cake meant things like winkles and frogs, and watermice, and—­Water Babies, of course!

“Well, you know, it was no joke hunting the Water Babies, for the old muskrats could fight, and would, and did!  And after Dagger Bill and his family had breakfasted on two or three Water Babies, there was great excitement in all the muskrat homes.

“Dagger Bill was a new enemy, and they were not quite sure how to manage him.  The mink they knew, the fox they knew, and the noiseless, terrible eagle owl, and the swooping hawk.  All these they had their tricks for evading.  And the savage pike they would sometimes fight in his own element.