What a thirst-baking day it was for Benny the Beaver as he went through his daily task of gnawing off twigs and branches from the trees that grew along the bank of the Busy River!
“What do you think I am going to do with these?” he asked his cousin, Jimmy Skunk, who had plodded all the way up from the Smiling Pool to see him.
“I don’t know. What are you going to do with them?” asked Jimmy Knunk.
“I’m going to build a dam over the big puddle that is back of the old orchard,” said Benny the Beaver.
“You don’t mean to say that big puddle over which Farmer Green had a quarrel with the man on the hill-top last summer about the ten new roosts he put for his hens? That must have taken you days and days just to make a dam for it, Benny.”
“That was all last summer,” Benny explained. Then he added: “It looks just the same now as it did then, only there’s a good-sized pond now in place of the big puddle.”
Benny dropped the twigs he had in his mouth and went over to a willow tree that grew close by. He sat down on the bank with his tail in the water, and told Jimmy Skunk all about it.
“Ah, I see! It’s very fortunate that Farmer Green had that trouble last summer,” said Jimmy Skunk, “or there wouldn’t have been a pond there this summer. It’s going to be a fine new home for you.”
“Yes,” said Benny, “and I meant to come over several times this spring and work at it, but I had so many things to do, and so much dull, rainy weather, that I didn’t get started.”
Benny felt very much ashamed to admit all this to Jimmy Skunk.
“You see,” he went on, “now I have to put it all through in hurry. And I made a perfect mess of it yesterday—Oh, I have splashed and drenched myself since I started this morning!”
He was indeed a funny-looking sight, for he was soaked to the skin, while the ground was quite dry just a little way from him. Jim Skunk could hardly help laughing as Benny spoke.
“Perhaps you will do just the same to-day,” he said gravely. “Then you can go in swimming. That’s all the fun there is about a wetting anyhow.”
In a little while Benny picked up the twigs and started for the big puddle. In hurried way he began to pile them very carelessly above the surface of the water, but with no thought of the proper way to put them together. He jumped on to the top of the dam when he had finished and danced a jig to prove how solid it was, and with a few well-placed thumps from his stout tail, Benny the Beaver was quite sure that he was fixed all right.
And Benny was so sure that he sat down and began to eat all the nice tender twigs that he had brought.
Suddenly, Pop! went one end of the dam. It had burst out of Benny’s careless work. Ah, what a splash! He never stopped to see what was the matter, but away he swam down the river as fast as he could go, until he met two of his Cousins Knotts and all three came back to see what had happened this time.
They found the dam in many pieces, and the pond completely drained out of the puddle. The three Cousins tried all day, but Mamma Beaver had to scold Benny for breaking his dam yesterday. This is why we have this saying today:
It will never do to hurry and do things heedlessly.