Jerry Muskrat At Home

Author : Thornton W Burgess
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9781674440668
Total Pages : 54 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (46 download)

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Download or read book The Adventures of Jerry Muskrat Illustrated And Annotated written by Thornton W Burgess and published by . This book was released on 2019-12-11 with total page 54 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: About Author: Thornton Waldo Burgess (January 17, 1874 - June 5, 1965) was an American conservationist and author of children's stories. Burgess loved the beauty of nature and its living creatures so much that he wrote about them for 50 years in books and his newspaper column, Bedtime Stories. He was sometimes known as the Bedtime Story-Man. By the time he retired, he had written more than 170 books and 15,000 stories for the daily newspaper column.Born January 17, 1874 in Sandwich, Massachusetts, Burgess was the son of Caroline F. Haywood and Thornton W. Burgess, Sr., a direct descendant of Thomas Burgess, one of the first Sandwich settlers in 1637. Thornton, Sr., died the same year his son was born, and the young Thornton, Jr. was brought up by his mother in Sandwich. They lived in humble circumstances. As a youth, he worked tending cows, picking trailing arbutus (mayflowers) or berries, shipping water lilies from local ponds, selling candy, and trapping muskrats. William C. Chipman, one of his employers, lived on Discovery Hill Road, a wildlife habitat of woodland and wetland. This habitat became the setting of many stories in which Burgess refers to Smiling Pool and the Old Briar Patch.Graduating from Sandwich High School in 1891, Burgess briefly attended a business college in Boston from 1892 to 1893, living in Somerville, Massachusetts, at that time. But he disliked studying business and wanted to be an author. He relocated to Springfield, Massachusetts, where he accepted a job as an editorial assistant at the Phelps Publishing Company. His first stories were written using the pseudonym W. B. Thornton.Burgess married Nina Osborne in 1905, but she died in childbirth a year later, leaving him to raise their son alone. It is said that he began writing bedtime stories to entertain his young son, Thornton III. Burgess remarried in 1911; his wife Fannie had two children by a previous marriage. The couple later bought a home in Hampden, Massachusetts in 1925, that became Burgess' permanent residence in 1957. His second wife died in August 1950. Burgess returned frequently to Sandwich, which he always claimed as his birthplace and spiritual home. Source: Wikipedia Product Description: Charming fable about the animals in the Green Forest and what happens when water stops flowing in the Laughing Brook and the Smiling Pool. This little book has two main storylines, both featuring Jerry Muskrat. In the first part, Jerry gets his tail pinched in a trap the farmer's boy left near the pond. His mother had warned him about traps, but he was careless. Soon the animals discover many traps and Grandfather Frog teaches them how to find the traps and avoid or spring them so they can stay safe (which greatly puzzles the farmer's boy). They are all duly warned not to take food they find lying around where it usually isn't, especially very delicious food, as it is often a trap. Some of them have to get hurt before they really learn to be cautious.In the second half of the book, the animals discover that the pool of water that makes their home is shrinking. Alarmed, several of them set off on a journey upstream to find out what the trouble is. Among them is Spotty the Turtle, and here the tale echoes the old Aesop's fable of the tortise and the hare. The other animals get distracted along the journey and stop for one reason or another, but Spotty just keeps plodding along so even though he's the slowest, he is the first to reach the source of trouble and find out what it is.Now the animals meet Paddy the Beaver and they are all intimidated his great size and the massive dam he's built. They want Jerry Muskrat to talk to Paddy about the problems he's causing; they figure the beaver might listen to Jerry since he's Paddy's little cousin. Jerry is nervous at first, but he gets his courage up to approach Paddy and finds that the beaver is a nice guy after all. Source: Wikipedia