Hardly had she indulged these pleasant thoughts of good eating, when she was surprised to see a visitor approaching her house. It was none other than the leanest and poorest of her cousins from the upper pond. Something in his presence told her of trouble to come. And her first question was not at all too polite.
"Why, what on earth are you down here for?" exclaimed Mrs. Muskrat. "Haven't you anything to do at home? I should think you would be busy putting in your own winter stores."
Before she could get any further, her lanky cousin interrupted her.
"Yes, yes; you would naturally think, Cousin Flattail, that we would be as busy as you are. But we have no longer any home to store things in, and we are at the edge of winter with starvation ahead of us. Farmer Jones drew the pond off yesterday. Already the shores of our poor meadow are drained of every drop. Our house is high and dry and we shall freeze to death if we stay in it."
With that they both looked up, for in the quiet society of the mill-pond a great confusion reigned.
All the poor relations were coming down from the upper meadows! Cousins, uncles, aunts, and brothers-in-law. It was an invasion—muskrats big and muskrats little.
Mrs. Muskrat gave one look and then bobbed down into the water and rushed through her house to lock the back door, scuttling again to the front to secure her main entrance by seating herself directly across it.
"There now!" she chattered angrily. "I'll watch any of you get into this house!"
For in the confusion of things people are often more distracted than need be, and Mrs. Muskrat was behaving very ugly and selfish because she hadn't taken time to think. All her neighbors behaved in much the same way at first; but when they saw the poor little baby cousins and reflected upon what this misfortune meant to the children, their hearts softened, and one by one the doors were opened, and the families invited in different ways to make the best of it. They must all live through the winter somehow.
But what they thought was going to be the season of the greatest hardship turned out to be the most brilliant winter that the muskrats had ever known, and the cousins all concluded that they never before had really appreciated one another.