r looked a bit sheepish, but he said nothing and waited patiently.
Presently Grandfather Frog cleared his throat two or three times and
began to talk.

"Once upon a time, long, long ago, when the world was young--"

"It seems to me that everything wonderful happened long ago when the
world was young," interrupted Peter.

Grandfather Frog looked at Peter severely, and Peter hastened to beg
his pardon.

After a long time Grandfather Frog began again.

"Once on a time, long, long ago, lived Mr. Beaver, the
great-great-ever-so-great grandfather of Paddy up there in the Green
Forest. Old Mr. Beaver was one of the hardest working of all of Old
Mother Nature's big family and one of the smartest, just as Paddy is
to-day. He always seemed happiest when he was busiest, and because he
liked to be happy all the time, he tried to keep busy all the time.

"He was very thrifty, was Mr. Beaver; not at all like some people I
know. He believed in preparing to-day for what might happen to-morrow,
and so when he had all the food he needed for the present, he stored
away food for the time when it might not be so easy to get. And he
believed in helping himself, did Mr. Beaver, and not in leaving
everything to Old Mother Nature, as did most of his neighbors. That is
how he first came to think of making a dam and a pond. Like his small
cousin, Mr. Muskrat, he was very fond of the water, and felt most at
home and safest there. But he found that sometimes the food which he
liked best, which was the bark of certain kinds of trees, grew some
distance from the water, and it was the hardest kind of hard work to
roll and drag the logs down to the water, where he could eat the bark
from them in safety.

"He thought about this a great deal, but instead of going to Old
Mother Nature and complaining, as most of his neighbors would have
done in his place, he studied and studied to find some way to make the
work easier. One day he noticed that a lot of sticks had caught in
the stream where he made his home, and that because the water could
not work its way between them as fast as where nothing hindered it, it
made a little pool just above the sticks. That made him think harder
than ever. He brought some of the logs and sticks from which he had
gnawed the bark and fastened them with the others, and right away the
pool grew bigger. The more sticks he added, the bigger the pool grew.
Mr. Beaver had discovered what a dam is for and how to build it.