heard all this, as he stood in
Grandaddy's doorway and peeped inside the house. And he thought it was
a shame that _somebody_ couldn't make Timothy Turtle mend his ways. To
Brownie Bearer it seemed that Timothy Turtle was old enough to behave
himself.

X

A WARNING

Timothy Turtle's visit at the beaver pond was just like all of his
outings. Wherever he went he was so disagreeable and snappish that there
wasn't a single person in the whole village that didn't wish Timothy had
stayed away from that place.

He was forever grumbling, complaining that the fishing was poor in the
pond. And as for frogs, he declared that he hadn't seen even one.

"Why anybody wants to live here is more than I can understand." That was
what Timothy Turtle told everyone he met. And of course it was a poor
way of making himself welcome.

"Why do you come here, if you don't like our pond?" people asked him.

"It's a change for me," was Timothy's reply. "After I've spent a week
with you I'll be pretty glad to get back home again. And I won't want to
go on another excursion for a whole year--or maybe two.

"It's twenty years since I was here before. And I sha'n't care to come
again for forty, at least."

Now, such dreadfully rude remarks hurt the Beaver family's feelings. And
when Timothy Turtle seized a fat lady by the tail one day and wouldn't
let her go until sunset, her feelings were hurt most of all. She cried
that she had never been so insulted in all her life.

Timothy Turtle merely said that she ought not to object. He explained
that he had been _giving her a rest_--for of course she couldn't cut
down a tree, nor work upon the dam that held the water in the pond,
while he clung fast to her tail.

Well, this fat lady happened to be Brownie Beaver's mother. And after
her disagreeable experience with the stranger, Brownie made up his mind
that he _would make Timothy Turtle work_. That was the worst punishment
he could think of.

Whenever the members of the Beaver family were not sleeping, or eating,
either they were gathering food by cutting down trees, or they were
mending their dam.

The dam always had leaks here and there. And sooner or later every one
of them had to be stopped, before it grew so big that the water would
rush through it and tear a hole so great that the pond would be drained
dry.

During his stay among the Beavers Timothy Turtle often crawled on top
of the dam and stretched himself out and watched