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I loved this book when I was little.
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Smiling Pool
The Adventures of Jerry Muskrat
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When the Smiling Pool and Laughing Brook dry up one day, Jerry Muskrat and the other forest animals set out to find the cause.
54 pages, Paperback
First published January 1,1914
This edition
- Format
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54 pages, Paperback
- Published
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November 3, 2006 by Hard Press
- ISBN
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9781406931815
- ASIN
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1406931810
- Language
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English
About the author
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Thornton W. (Waldo) Burgess (1874-1965), American author, naturalist and conservationist, wrote popular children's stories including the Old Mother West Wind (1910) series. He would go on to write more than 100 books and thousands of short-stories during his lifetime.
Thornton 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 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 W. Burgess, Sr., died the same year his son was born, and the young Thornton Burgess was brought up by his mother in Sandwich. They both lived in humble circumstances with relatives or paying rent. As a youth, he worked year round in order to earn money. Some of his jobs included tending cows, picking trailing arbutus 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 write. He moved to Springfield, Massachusetts, where he took a job as an editorial assistant at the Phelps Publishing Company. His first stories were written under the pen name W. B. Thornton.
Burgess married Nina Osborne in 1905, but she died only 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.
In 1960, Burgess published his last book, "Now I Remember, Autobiography of an Amateur Naturalist," depicting memories of his early life in Sandwich, as well as his career highlights. That same year, Burgess, at the age of 86, had published his 15,000th story. He died on June 5, 1965, at the age of 91 in Hampden, Massachusetts.
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27 reviews All reviews
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Kids love these
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In The Adventures of Jerry Muskrat, Jerry and his friends, Billy Mink, Little Joe Otter, Grandfather Frog and Spotty the Turtle, have a problem. Suddenly, the Smiling Pool isn’t smiling and the Laughing Brook isn’t laughing! What has happened to the water? They set off upstream to find out what happened, and find a dam built across the Laughing Brook, way upstream in the Green Forest. Jerry Muskrat never knew he had a big cousin in the North who could build like that!
Read my full review here.
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This children's book is definitely old fashioned but hasn't aged too badly. Although it can be read as a standalone or is better read as part of a series.
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Read the 1914 edition. Christmas gift to somebody way back when. Paddy the Beaver is the only dam character drawn without clothes. I find that quite amusing.
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The Adventures of Jerry Muskrat is one of the Bedtime Story Books Series by Thornton Burgess whose stories were all originally drawn by Harrison Cady. If you can get them with the original illustrations, you should do that. Sure, there's a sense of nostalgia that runs through me on re-reading something that my father would read to me, most nights. Yet, I would still argue that they hold value, as teaching devices, although I would also ask parents to screen the books, because some of the previous concepts may no longer be appropriate to current mores.
Here, the creatures of the Green Meadow and Green Forest discover that the Laughing Brook and the Smiling Pool are dropping to a dangerously low water level, threatening the lives of Jerry Muskrat, Little Joe Otter, Spotty the Turtle, Grandfather Frog, and Billy Mink. It behooves them to resolve the situation, but things become even more precarious when they find out that Farmer Brown's son has set some pretty nasty traps to thin the Green Forest population of critters.
These stories are really good educational devices to stimulate critical thinking, foster cooperation, and engender an understanding for the importance of a heterogeneous society. Some pneumonic devices, as well as repetition, and silly poetry are used to perpetuate learning.
Here, the creatures of the Green Meadow and Green Forest discover that the Laughing Brook and the Smiling Pool are dropping to a dangerously low water level, threatening the lives of Jerry Muskrat, Little Joe Otter, Spotty the Turtle, Grandfather Frog, and Billy Mink. It behooves them to resolve the situation, but things become even more precarious when they find out that Farmer Brown's son has set some pretty nasty traps to thin the Green Forest population of critters.
These stories are really good educational devices to stimulate critical thinking, foster cooperation, and engender an understanding for the importance of a heterogeneous society. Some pneumonic devices, as well as repetition, and silly poetry are used to perpetuate learning.
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This was a fun little book that told about different creatures through story. The chapters were extremely short (some just a couple pages) and tended to summarize/recap the last chapter. Which might have been helpful to pull the threads of memory out for us if we only read one chapter a day; but as the case was, we read five or so per day, and I found it a bit tiresome (but the kids didn't say anything about it).
Other than that, the story was good, the sentence structures and vocabulary wonderful and charming, the narrative told gently and conversationally as if your grandfather had you on his knee spinning a yarn for you, and besides all that, we learned a bit about speaking respectfully, persevering through hard things, and being a friend.
Other than that, the story was good, the sentence structures and vocabulary wonderful and charming, the narrative told gently and conversationally as if your grandfather had you on his knee spinning a yarn for you, and besides all that, we learned a bit about speaking respectfully, persevering through hard things, and being a friend.
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