While you are finding out who Mr. Torrey is and what he has written, you should also get acquainted with John Burroughs, Olive Thorne Miller, Thoreau, Frank Bolles, William Hamilton Gibson, C. C. Abbott, Edward Breck, Gilbert White, and--but these will do for _this_ fall. Don’t fail to read dear old Gilbert White’s “Natural History of Selborne”; though perhaps we grown-ups like it better than you may this fall. If you don’t understand Gilbert White, then read this year “The Life of a Scotch Naturalist” by Samuel Smiles, and Arabella Buckley’s two books, “Life and Her Children,” and “Winners in Life’s Race.” IX You ought to tie up a piece of suet for the birds; keep your cat in the house, except during the middle of the day, and--but I shall tell you no more. There is no end to the interesting things to do in your study of the out of doors and in your tramps afield this autumn. CHAPTER VIII THE MUSKRATS ARE BUILDING We have had a week of almost unbroken rain, and the water is standing over the swampy meadow. It is a dreary stretch,--this wet, sedgy land in the cold twilight,--drearier than any part of the woods or the upland pastures. They are empty; but the meadow is flat and wet, it is naked and all unsheltered. And a November night is falling. The darkness deepens. A raw wind is rising. At nine o’clock the moon swings round and full to the crest of the ridge, and pours softly over. I button my heavy ulster close, and in my rubber boots go down to the stream and follow it out to the middle of the meadow, where it meets the main ditch. There is a sharp turn here toward the swamp; and here at the bend, behind a clump of black alders, I sit quietly down and wait. I have come out to the bend to watch the muskrats building; for that small mound up the ditch is not an old haycock, but a half-finished muskrat house. As I wait, the moon climbs higher over the woods. The water on the meadow shivers in the light. The wind bites through my heavy coat and drives me back, but not before I have seen one, two, three little creatures scaling the walls of the house with loads of mud-and-reed mortar. I am driven back by the cold, but not before I know that here in the desolate meadow is being rounded off a lodge, thick-walled and warm, and proof against the longest, bitterest of winters. This is near the end of November. My fire-wood is in the cellar; I am about ready to put on the double-windows and the storm-doors. The muskrats are even now putting on theirs, for their house is all but finished. Winter is at hand: but we are prepared, the muskrats and I. Throughout the summer the muskrats had no house, only their tunnels into the sides of the ditch, their roadways out into the grass, and their beds under the tussocks or among the roots of the old stumps. All those months the water was low in the ditch, and the beds among the tussocks were safe and dry enough. [Illustration: “TO-NIGHT THERE IS NO LOAFING ABOUT THE LODGE”]