see it clearly

Jerry Muskrat's Secret Door

By Thornton W. Burgess

Jerry Muskrat's new house was growing. Yes, indeed, it certainly was growing, with so many helpers to cut alder and willow shoots and bulrushes and to bring them to him. Jerry was very busy just building. It was not time at all before the walls of Jerry Muskrat's new house showed above the water and then they grew higher and higher and higher.

Jerry Muskrat worked and worked and worked with might and main. You see no one could help him actually build his new house for winter, because no one but himself knew just how it should be built. He put willow and alder shoots just so. He placed rushes and grass just where they were needed, and then he kept them in place with mud.

"That's a queer looking hose," said Sammy Jay. "It looks to me like nothing but a pile of old rubbish."

"Just you wait," replied Jerry Muskrat, as he climbed up to place more bulrushes on the roof.

So Sammy Jay waited, for there was nothing else to do, and the house grew and grew and grew. By and by the roof was on and Jerry Muskrat sat on top of it to rest and eat his supper of fresh water clams which he had brought up from the bottom of the Smiling Pool. Sammy Jay cocked his head on one side.

"Pooh!" said Sammy Jay. "That's no kind of a house! It hasn't any door."

Jerry Muskrat just grinned and said nothing. He was too busy opening a fresh water clam to talk. Sammy Jay began to laugh.

"What are you laughing at?" asked his cousin Black the Crow.

"I am laughing at Jerry Muskrat. He's build a new house, and it hasn't any door. Ha! ha! ha!" replied Sammy Jay.

Black the Crow flew close down to Jerry Muskrat's new house and looked it all over; that is, he looked at all that he could see. Sure enough, he could find no door. Then Blacky the Crow began to laugh, too, and flew over on the Green Meadows to tell the little meadow people about the great joke on Jerry Muskrat -- how he had built a house without any door.

But Jerry Muskrat didn't seem to mind, not in the teeniest, weeniest bit. When he had finished his last fresh water clam, Jerry washed his face and combed his hair, and his eyes twinkled as he shouted to Sammy Jay:

"Some folks believe just what they see
And think that nothing else can be.
But some folks don't know all they might --
My door is hidden out of sight."

Splash! Jerry Muskrat had dived into the Smiling Pool. Two minutes later he was making his bed of soft grass in the upper room of his new house. You see he had a secret door down under the water.