working all night and
all day. Nobody could do that, you know, and keep it up. Everybody has
to rest and sleep. Yes, and everybody has to play a little to be at
their best. So it wasn't quite true that Paddy worked all day after
working all night. But it was true that Paddy had no time to play. He
had too much to do. He had had his playtime during the long summer, and
now he had to get ready for the long cold winter.

Now of all the little workers in the Green Forest, on the Green Meadows,
and in the Smiling Pool, none can compare with Paddy the Beaver, not
even his cousin, Jerry Muskrat. Happy Jack Squirrel and Striped Chipmunk
store up food for the long cold months when rough Brother North Wind and
Jack Frost rule, and Jerry Muskrat builds a fine house wherein to keep
warm and comfortable, but all this is as nothing to the work of Paddy
the Beaver.

As I said before, Paddy had had a long playtime through the summer. He
had wandered up and down the Laughing Brook. He had followed it way up
to the place where it started. And all the time he had been studying and
studying to make sure that he wanted to stay in the Green Forest. In the
first place, he had to be sure that there was plenty of the kind of food
that he likes. Then he had to be equally sure that he could make a pond
near where this particular food grew. Last of all, he had to satisfy
himself that if he did make a pond and build a home, he would be
reasonably safe in it. And all these things he had done in his playtime.
Now he was ready to go to work, and when Paddy begins work, he sticks to
it until it is finished. He says that is the only way to succeed, and
you know and I know that he is right.

Now Paddy the Beaver can see at night just as Reddy Fox and Peter
Rabbit and Bobby Coon can, and he likes the night best, because he feels
safest then. But he can see in the daytime too, and when he feels that
he is perfectly safe and no one is watching, he works then too. Of
course the first thing to do was to build a dam across the Laughing
Brook to make the pond he so much needed. He chose a low open place deep
in the Green Forest, around the edge of which grew many young
aspen-trees, the bark of which is his favorite food. Through the middle
of this open place flowed the Laughing Brook. At the lower edge was just
the place for a dam. It would not have to be very long, and when it was
finished and the water was stopped in the Laughing Brook, it would just
have