Jerry Muskrat looked over the Smiling Pool. Almost at once he saw Grandfather Frog fast asleep on his big green lily-pad. Jerry slipped down into the water and swam over to the big green lily-pad of Grandfather Frog. Then he hit the water a smart blow with his tail. Grandfather Frog's big goggly eyes flew open, and he was just about to make a frightened plunge into the Smiling Pool when he saw Jerry. "Have a nice nap?" inquired Jerry, with a broad grin. "I wasn't asleep!" protested Grandfather Frog indignantly. "I was just thinking." Elsewhere, Billy Mink and Little Joe Otter were planning to pull a perfectly rotten trick. "What can we do?" said Little Joe Otter . "I've thought of a plan," replied Billy. "Do you happen to know where we can find Longlegs the Blue Heron?" "Yes," said Little Joe. "I saw him fishing not five minutes ago." Then Billy told Little Joe his plan, and laughing and giggling, the two little scamps hurried off to find Longlegs the Blue Heron. Longlegs, you see, was hungry -- and everyone knows that what he likes to eat is frogs!

Author Biography

Thornton Waldo Burgess (1874 - 1965) was a conservationist and author of children's stories. 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. By the time he retired, he had written more than 170 books and 15,000 stories for the daily newspaper column.