The Mushrats are Building 
and love as soon as his heart warms up enough to 
beat. 
I have seen frogs frozen into the middle of solid 
lumps of ice in the laboratory. Drop the lump on the 
floor, and the frog would break out like a fragment 
of the ice itself. And this has happened more than 
once to the same frog without causing him the least 
apparent suffering or inconvenience. He would come 
to, and croak, and look as wise as ever. 
The north wind may blow, 
but the muskrats are building; and it is by no 
means a cheerless prospect, this wood-and-meadow 
world of mine in the gray November light. The 
frost will not fall to-night as falls the plague on men; 
the brightness of the summer is gone, yet this chill 
gloom is not the sombre shadow of a pall. Nothing 
is dying in the fields: the grass-blades are wilting, 
the old leaves are falling, but no square foot of 
greensward will the winter kill, nor a single tree 
perhaps in my wood-lot. There will be no less of 
life next April because of this winter, unless, per- 
chance, conditions altogether exceptional starve some 
of the winter birds. These suffer most ; yet as the 
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