THe Muskrats are Building 
just as I can see and feel the glow when I watch the 
slender blue wraith rise into the still air from the 
chimney of the old farmhouse along the road below. 
For I share in the life of both houses; and not less 
in the life of the mud house of the meadow, because, 
instead of Swedes, they are muskrats who live there. 
I can share the existence of a muskrat? Easily. I 
like to curl up with the three or four of them in that 
mud house and there spend the worst days of the 
winter. My own big house here on the hilltop is 
sometimes cold. And the wind! If sometimes I could 
only drive the insistent winter wind from the house 
corners! But down in the meadow the house has no 
corners; the mud walls are thick, so thick and round 
that the shrieking wind sweeps past unheard, and all 
unheeded the cold creeps over and over the thatch, 
then crawls back and stiffens upon the meadow. 
The doors of our house in the meadow swing open 
the winter through. Just outside the doors stand our 
stacks of fresh calamus roots, and iris, and arum. The 
roof of the universe has settled close and hard upon 
us, —a sheet of ice extending from the ridge of the 
house far out to the shores of the meadow. The win- 
ter is all above the roof — outside. It blows and snows 
7 
