This chapter and the next (chapter IX) should be taken together as a single study of the provision of nature against the severity of winter’s cold, chapter VIII being a detailed account of one creature’s preparations, while chapter IX follows, showing how the foresight and care obtain even among the plants and trees. The two chapters together should give the pupils a glad thought for winter, should utterly change their conventional language and feeling for it as a time of _death_. And instead of lamenting the season as a necessary evil, you must show them that it is to be welcomed as a period of sleep for nature from which she will waken in all the freshness of a springtime such as is nowhere to be had outside of the temperate zone. “It is not always May,” wails the poet; but ask them: Who wants it always May? We want the variety, the contrasts of our four seasons, and as to winter, let the North Wind blow at will, redden our cheeks, quicken our step, put purpose into our wills and--it won’t starve us; for we, too, like the muskrat, are provided for. FOR THE PUPIL 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. PAGE 63 _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. PAGE 64 _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. PAGE 65 _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. PAGE 66 _tepee_: What is a tepee?