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HE king of the river was predestined to ad© venture. It was his heritage and he accepted it phlegmatically, as he accepted all things, both good and ill. His adventures began early in his career—on the day when he first saw the light. They began not gradually or mildly, but grimly and fiercely, and it was only a fortunate chance that prevented his first day from being his last. But the king of the river had also been born lucky. The outcome of that first day's encounter marked the beginning of his luck.

He lay with twenty-seven of his brothers and sisters in the warm shallow water close to the edge of a small cypress-bordered lagoon. He was very tired, for he had just made a long journey—a journey of more than two hundred yards from the dry ridge in the swamp, where the alligator nest was situated, to the margin of the lonely swamp lake which was to be the home of his youth. The eight-foot saurian which had laid the eggs in that nest, covering them with sand and leaves and committing them to the care of the sun, had not returned when the time for hatching came, and the little black