If there is a muskrat house or village of houses in your neighborhood, report to the class, or better, take teacher and class, as soon as freezing weather comes, to see it. Go out yourselves and try to see the muskrats plastering their walls on one of the bright October nights.
_muskrats combine_: The author has frequently found as many as six rats in a single house; but whether all of these helped in the building or not, he is unable to say.
_winter house_: If the house is undisturbed (as when situated out in a stumpy pond) it will stand for years, the rats dwelling in it the year around.
_pick and shovel_: What is meant by a fox's "pick and shovel"?
_Lupton's Pond_: the name of a little wood-walled pond that the author haunted as a boy.
"The best-laid schemes o' mice and men Gang aft agley."
Learn this poem ("To A Mouse") by heart. Burns is the author.
_very much alike_: Name some other respects in which animals and men are alike in their lives. What famous line in the poem just quoted is it that makes men and mice very closely related?
_bottom of the house_: Down in the very foundation walls of the muskrat's house are two runways or "doors" that open under water and so far under that they rarely if ever freeze. See picture of such a house with its door in the author's "Wild Life Near Home," page 174.
_juicy and pink and tender_: The muskrats eat grass stems and roots, so that under the water near the lodge you will often find in winter little stacks of these tender pink stems and roots ready for eating--much as the beaver stores up sticks of tender bark under the water near his lodge for food when the ice forms overhead.
_Winter is coming_: Are you glad or sorry? Are you ready?
Let the pupils continue this list of examples of winter preparations by watching and observing for themselves. Every field, every tree, every roadside, will reveal the work done or going on under their eyes. Without preaching you may draw many an interesting and telling parallel with their own preparation--in school for instance.
"The north wind doth blow, And we shall have snow, And what will the Robin do then, Poor thing?"
Where does the verse come from? Mother Goose? Yes, but who was she?
_Chipmunk_: Our little striped ground squirrel, interesting because he has cheek-pouches and thus forms a link between the arboreal squirrels (gray squirrels, etc.) and the ground squirrels or spermophiles, of which the beautiful little thirteen-lined squirrel of the prairies is an example.