The Adventures of Jerry Muskrat | Page 8

the Laughing Brook left to laugh, and there wasn't enough of the
Smiling Pool left to smile.
It was dreadful! Jerry looked over to his house, of which he had once
been so proud. He had built it with the doorway under water. He had
felt perfectly safe there, because no one excepting Billy Mink or Little
Joe Otter, who can swim under water, could reach him. Now the
Smiling Pool had grown so small that Jerry's house wasn't in the water
at all. Anybody who wanted to could get into it. There was the doorway
plainly to be seen. Worse still, there was the secret entrance to the long
tunnel leading to his castle under the roots of the Big Hickory-tree.
That had been Jerry's most secret secret, and now there it was for all the
world to see. And there were all the wonderful caves and holes and
hiding-places under the bank which had been known only to Jerry
Muskrat and Billy Mink and Little Joe Otter, because the openings had
always been under water. Now anybody could find them, for they were
plainly to be seen. And where had always been smiling, dimpling water,
Jerry saw only mud. It was mud, mud, mud everywhere! The bulrushes,
which had always grown with their feet in the water, now had them
only in mud, and that was fast drying up. The lily-pads lay half curled
up at the ends of their long stems, stretched out on the mud, and looked
very, very sick. Jerry turned towards the Laughing Brook. There was
just a little, teeny, weeny stream of water trickling down the middle of
it, with here and there a tiny pool in which frightened trout and

minnows were crowded. All the secrets of the Laughing Brook were
exposed, just as were the secrets of the Smiling Pool. Jerry knew that if
he wanted to find Billy Mink's hiding-places, all he need do would be
to walk up the Laughing Brook and look.
"Yes, Sir, the world has turned upside down," said Jerry in a mournful
voice.
"I believe it has," replied Grandfather Frog, looking up from the little
pool of water left at the foot of the Big Rock.
"I know it has!" cried Jerry. "I wonder if it will ever turn upside up
again."
"If it doesn't, what are you going to do?" asked Grandfather Frog.
"I don't know," replied Jerry Muskrat. "Here come Little Joe Otter and
Billy Mink; let's find out what they are going to do."
CHAPTER XI
: Five Heads Together
Something had to be done. Jerry Muskrat said so. Grandfather Frog
said so. Billy Mink said so. Little Joe Otter said so. Even Spotty the
Turtle said so. The Laughing Brook couldn't laugh, and the Smiling
Pool couldn't smile. You see, there wasn't water enough in either of
them to laugh or smile, and nobody knew if there ever would be again.
Nobody had ever known anything like it before, and so nobody knew
what to think or do. And yet they all felt that something must be done.
"What do you think, Billy Mink?" asked Grandfather Frog.
Billy Mink looked down from the top of the Big Rock into the little
pool of water that was all there was left of the Smiling Pool. He could
see a dozen fat trout in it, and he knew that he could catch them just as
easily as not, because there was no place for them to swim away from
him. But somehow he didn't want to catch them. He knew that they

were frightened almost to death already by the running away of nearly
all the water from the Laughing Brook and the Smiling Pool, and
somehow he felt sorry for them.
"I think that the best thing we can do is to move down to the Big River.
I've been down there, and that's all right," said Billy Mink.
"That's what I think, " said Little Joe Otter. "There's no danger that the
Big River will go dry."
"How do you know?" asked Jerry Muskrat. "The Laughing Brook and
the Smiling Pool never went dry before."
"It's a long, long way down to the Big River," broke in Spotty the
Turtle, who travels very, very slowly and carries his house with him.
"Chugarum! I, for one, don't want to leave the Smiling Pool without
finding out what the trouble is.
"There's nothing happens, as you know, But has a cause to make it so.
"Now there must be some cause, some reason, for this terrible trouble
with the Smiling Pool, and if we can find that out, perhaps we shall
know better what to do," said Grandfather Frog.
Jerry Muskrat nodded his head. "Grandfather Frog is right," said he.
"Of course there must be