Green Meadow Stories by Thornton W. Burgess (good short books .txt) 📕
Description
Thornton W. Burgess was an American naturalist and the author of dozens of books for children, the most enduring of which are Old Mother West Wind and The Burgess Bird Book for Children. Burgess was a passionate twentieth-century conservationist who dedicated his life to teaching children and their families about the importance of the natural life of the northern North American forest.
The Green Meadow Stories compilation is made up of four distinct but entwined tales: those of Happy Jack Squirrel, Mrs. Peter Rabbit, Bowser the Hound, and Old Granny Fox. Through the adventures of these focal characters readers are introduced to the wider territory of the Green Meadows, the Green Forest, and the Smiling Pond as well as to the animals’ Great World.
The animals of Burgess’s stories are anthropomorphized, undoubtedly, but not caricatured: these are not the twee creatures of Disney cartoons. Their behaviour is explained in ways that would be understandable to a human child—this is fiction, after all—but Burgess’s “little people of the forest” are not simply humans dressed in fur and feathers. The original illustrations in Burgess’s books (by Harrison Cady, not reproduced in this edition) show the animals wearing clothes, but Burgess’s own descriptions of animals are more natural and metaphorical, and less fantastic. For example, he describes Chatterer the Red Squirrel, “who always wears a red coat with vest of white,” a compact way of communicating the look of a squirrel that many of today’s children will never have seen with their own eyes. Less pleasantly, it is Peter Rabbit’s fur and flesh that is rent when Hooty the Owl tears Peter’s “coat” one night on the Old Pasture.
Burgess has tremendous respect for the creatures he depicts, as well as for their natural home. While the presentation of the Green Meadow is hardly “Nature, red in tooth and claw,” it is surprisingly unsentimental. Peter Rabbit, for example, lives a highly anxious life under threat from the many predators who would enjoy having him for dinner; similarly, Happy Jack Squirrel experiences days and nights of terror when Shadow the Weasel discovers Happy Jack’s home and hunts him relentlessly. During a long, hard winter, Granny Fox and Reddy Fox come close to starving, and Old Man Coyote leads Bowser the Hound on a dangerous chase that may result in one or the other dying. Despite other fanciful, sentimental elements of storytelling, Burgess does not sugarcoat prey/predator relationships or the precarity of wild animals’ lives.
Burgess is a clear conservationist in his representations of hunting. The animals are highly aware of hunters and their “dreadful guns.” It is a notable moment in this collection when Farmer Brown’s Boy decides he will no longer use his gun to harm the little people of the Green Meadow and the Green Forest. The stories are also notable in their detailed representation of a largely intact forest, something few children in the twenty-first century will experience.
On the other hand, these are books for children, and they contain plenty of sweetness and light. Animal pairings—such as when Peter Rabbit meets the dainty Little Miss Fuzzytail, the future Mrs. Rabbit—are vague but sentimental and soon lead to proud new families of Rabbits, Ducks, Deer, and Owls. The “little people” celebrate the arrival of each spring’s babies, mark each other’s new relationships and homes, play together, and even help each other survive. They laugh, tease, and trick each other—a fanciful interpretation of animal behaviour that could lead to a reader’s life-long fascination with, and respect for, forest creatures—and for generations of readers, they did just that.
The stories are also more didactic than most twenty-first-century authors would dare to be. There are morals associated with most stories, often attributed to the animal about whom the story is being told. Through this practical teaching, Burgess suggests a correspondence between how animals and humans live; but he consistently clarifies that animal intelligence is different from, but certainly no less than, human intelligence.
Unlike the bouncy rhyming verses of many of today’s children’s books, Burgess’s sentences have a somewhat old-fashioned cadence, creating the distinct and appealing music of traditional storytelling. Burgess’s episodic chapters are eminently readable and particularly come to life when they are voiced by animated reading-aloud. For older readers looking for something different to share with children, or for new readers beginning to tackle “chapter books,” the tales of the Green Meadow Stories collection are a delightful place to discover Burgess and his animal friends.
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- Author: Thornton W. Burgess
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“A good breakfast,” said Peter, “will make a new Rabbit of me.” You know Peter thinks a great deal of his stomach. So he began to eat as fast as he could, stopping every other mouthful to look and listen. “I know it’s a bad habit to eat fast,” said he, “but it’s a whole lot worse to have an empty stomach.” So he ate and ate and ate as fast as he could make his little jaws go, which is very fast indeed.
When Peter’s stomach was stuffed full he gave a great sigh of relief and limped back to the friendly old bramble-bush to rest. But he couldn’t sit still long, for he just had to find out all about the Old Pasture. So pretty soon he started out to explore. Such a wonderful place as it seemed to Peter! There were clumps of bushes with little open spaces between, just the nicest kind of playgrounds. Then there were funny spreading, prickly juniper-trees, which made the very safest places to crawl out of harm’s way and to hide. Everywhere were paths made by cows. Very wonderful they seemed to Peter, who had never seen any like them before. He liked to follow them because they led to all kinds of queer places.
Sometimes he would come to places where tall trees made him think of the Green Forest, only there were never more than a few trees together. Once he found an old tumble-down stone wall all covered with vines, and he shouted right out with delight.
“It’s a regular castle!” cried Peter, and he knew that there he would be safe from everyone but Shadow the Weasel. But he never was wholly safe from Shadow the Weasel anywhere, so he didn’t let that thought worry him. By and by he came to a wet place called a swamp. The ground was soft, and there were little pools of water. Great ferns grew here just as they did along the bank of the Laughing Brook, only more of them. There were pretty birch-trees and wild cherry-trees. It was still and dark and oh, so peaceful! Peter liked that place and sat down under a big fern to rest. He didn’t hear a sound excepting the beautiful silvery voice of Veery the Thrush. Listening to it, Peter fell asleep, for he was very tired.
By and by Peter awoke. For a minute he couldn’t think where he was. Then he remembered. But for a long time he sat perfectly still, thinking of his adventures and wondering if he would be missed down on the Green Meadows. Then all of a sudden Peter saw something that made him sit up so suddenly that he cried “Ouch!” for he had forgotten all about how stiff and sore he was.
What do you think Peter saw? Tracks! Yes, sir, he saw tracks, Rabbit tracks in the soft mud, and Peter knew that he hadn’t made them!
VIII The Strange Tracks in the Old PastureWho has attentive ear and eye
Will learn a lot if he but try.
Peter Rabbit stared and stared at the tracks in the soft mud of the swamp in the Old Pasture. He would look first at the tracks, then at his own feet, and finally back at the tracks again. He scratched his long right ear with his long right hind foot. Then he scratched his long left ear with his long left hind foot, all the time staring his hardest at those strange tracks. They certainly were the tracks of a Rabbit, and it was equally certain that they were not his own.
“They are too big for mine, and they are too small for Jumper the Hare’s. Besides, Jumper is in the Green Forest and not way off up here,” said Peter to himself. “I wonder—well, I wonder if he will try to drive me away.”
You see Peter knew that if he had found a strange Rabbit in his dear Old Briar-patch he certainly would have tried his best to drive him out, for he felt that the Old Briar-patch belonged to him. Now he wondered if the maker of these tracks would feel the same way about the Old Pasture. Peter looked troubled as he thought it over. Then his face cleared.
“Perhaps,” said he hopefully, “he is a newcomer here, too, and if he is, I’ll have just as much right here as he has. Perhaps he simply has big feet and isn’t any bigger or stronger than I am, and if that’s the case I’d like to see him drive me out!”
Peter swelled himself out and tried to look as big as he could when he said this, but swelling himself out this way reminded him of how stiff and sore he was from the wounds given him by Hooty the Owl, and he made a wry face. You see he realized all of a sudden that he didn’t feel much like fighting.
“My,” said Peter, “I guess I’d better find out all about this other fellow before I have any trouble with him. The Old Pasture looks big enough for a lot of Rabbits, and perhaps if I don’t bother him, he won’t bother me. I wonder what he looks like. I believe I’ll follow these tracks and see what I can find.”
So Peter began to follow the tracks of the strange Rabbit, and he was so interested that he almost forgot to limp. They led him this way and they led him that way through the swamp and then out of it. At the foot
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