64 THE FALL OF THE YEAR 



is built upon a tussock ; and a tussock — did you 

 ever try to pull up a tussock? 



Winter may descend, and boys and foxes may 

 come — and they will come, but not before the walls 

 are frozen. Then, let them come. The house will 

 stand. It is boy-proof, almost ; it is entirely rain-, 

 cold-, and fox-proof. I have often seen where the 

 fox has gone round and round the house in the 

 snow, and where, at places, he has attempted to dig 

 into the frozen mortar. But it was a foot thick, as 

 hard as flint, and utterly impossible for his pick and 

 shovel. 



I said the floods, as well as the fox, may come. 

 So they may, ordinarily; but along in March, when 

 one comes as a freshet and rises to the dome of the 

 house, then it fills the bed-chamber to the ceiling 

 and drowns the dwellers out. I remember a freshet 

 once in the end of February that flooded Lupton's 

 Pond and drove the muskrats of the whole pond 

 village to their ridgepoles, to the bushes, and to 

 whatever wreckage the waters brought along. 



" The best-laid schemes o' mice and men 

 Gang aft agley " 



— and of muskrats, too. 



But not very often do the muskrats' plans go thus 

 agley. For muskrats and wood mice and birds and 

 bees, and even the very trees of the forest, have a kind 

 of natural foresight. They all look ahead, at the ap- 

 proach of autumn, and begin to provide against the 



