silence, or paddling among the slime,
its teeth and toes were muffled. The world just here was dreadfully
damp, dreadfully secret, and dreadfully old.

Not a nice nursery for babies, you might imagine. In such a place, if
ever a baby were rash enough to get born there, you would think it must
be born old, and be damp for the rest of its days. Which only shows how
deceptive things may be. For--in the very heart of the dampness, and
where the ancientness was so old as to have begun falling to pieces--two
perfectly new, and (what is perhaps even more surprising) perfectly dry
babies were curled up in a hollow scooped out between the roots of a
couple of hemlocks growing together on a knoll! Neither the dampness,
nor the ancientness, nor the silence, nor the gloom, nor any of the
other things which would have made ordinary civilized people
uncomfortable, had the least effect upon the babies. To be quite
truthful, I must here remark that it was partly because they were fast
asleep. If you curl yourself up very tight, and sleep very sound, and
if, when you wake, you spend a good deal of your spare time in taking in
food, it is quite surprising what a snug place the old, damp world may
seem; and it would be quite ridiculous to sit up and worry.

Except very rarely the babies did not sit up. Their usual position when
awake was a sprawling one on their stomachs, while they pushed their
little fore paws into their mother's and sucked and sucked and sucked.
And most certainly they never worried; worrying being a disease which
grown people seem to catch from each other in places where the sky
scrapers go up and scratch the stars.

The babies in the tamarack swamp knew nothing about civilization. Their
umbrella was the hemlock and their mother's body was the stove. And if a
raving wind moaned gustily in the poplars, and twisted the tamaracks
till they creaked, the umbrella never closed and the stove never burned
out.

Perhaps I ought to be a little more accurate about the stove. It did not
burn out, but it sometimes _went_ out. Occasionally when the babies woke
up, they found that the stove had gone out walking, taking care,
however, to leave part of its warmth behind.

One day Dusty Star, on his way across to the opposite side of the valley
to dig roots, passed through the spruce wood which skirted the swamp on
its eastern side. On the brown, elastic carpet of dead fir needles, he
went without paying any special heed to his f