reveal themselves, where in summer they could hardly be traced. Now they offer the best footing, but lead nowhither. Whenever we step out of them we trip and stumble, our clothing is seized by innumerable detaining thorn-fingers, and the soil, left spongy by the frost, sinks elastic and oozy beneath our tread.

Poking aside the leaves and grass on this warm hillside, where spherical swarms of minute flies are going through a mazy dance in the air, many herbs may be found already green and making ready to flower in the earliest spring, such as the hepatica, the cinquefoil, violet, and strawberry; but most of the leaves and runners of the last are varnished with rich burnt-brown tints as though japanned.

In the swollen but crystal-clear brooks, flowing at the foot of the slope among the weeds with a gentle tinkling sound, the aquatic ranunculus and the water-cress are glowing with emerald foliage, and we discover a few cylindrical cases of young caddis-flies anchored to the submerged stems of the plants. The mosses and little ferns on the bank are green, and where the meadows have been overflowed the alders are so full of embryo blossoms that their branches seem loaded with purple fruit.

Although the woods are so silent at this early season (whenever you are beyond hearing the frogs), echoing only occasionally the odd, jerky soliloquy of the scrambling little nuthatch, the cheery voice of the chickadee, and perhaps the boastful scream of a bluejay, there is a large aggregate of feathered life abroad in March, even before many migratory birds have come. Several of the birds of prey, and often the ravens and crows, are already breeding. The snowbirds and tree-sparrows linger in the pastures; the large, handsome, fox-colored sparrows appear; the cedar-birds whirl in and out of the red cedars and eat their purple berries greedily; a few song-sparrows dodge about the fence-rows, and little woodpeckers are hammering here and there wherever they can find a dead limb that may possibly conceal some undiscovered grub, or will, at any rate, reward them with a cheerful tattoo.

These, and the early migrants from the South, find an abundant harvest preserved for them in the meadows and wood-pastures, despite their desolate appearance; yet, considering the minuteness of the grass-seeds upon which they mainly feed, it is appalling to think what an enormous number of bites a bird must take to make

out a dinner! But larger mouthfuls have been kept for them. The bayberry, or false myrtle, gleams with dense clusters of greenish-white berries; the close, somber foliage of the juniper, or savin, is enlivened by innumerable purplish berries, upon which all the birds nearly gorge themselves sometimes; black alders, "glowing with the brightest scarlet fruit, and resembling at a distance pyramids of flame," are scattered about the lowlands, while on higher ground the stately mountain-ash repeats the scene, witches or no witches.

Sometimes, after a considerable interval of warm weather has melted away all traces of winter, and we fondly think its forces have been permanently beaten back, a heavy snow-storm will return, and then a new scene presents itself to the rambler. On the night before, perhaps, mock-moons have been hung in the glowering sky, and next morning the sunlight will struggle down silver-gray through blustering winds and thickly flying snow. As, with bent head, I force my way into the fields, the air about me is full of light, and nearer objects are clear enough, but at a comparatively short distance little can be seen distinctly, although the white light seems continuous; and the receding town becomes more and more a beautiful shining

ghost of architecture, washed-in flat, as painters would say, with luminous tints gradually fading away to nothing, yet never losing their transparency.

At first nothing is perceptible but the deafening gale and smothering snow, until presently I come to a ravine on the leeward side of a hill, where a grove of cedars is overgrown and tied together with squirrel-brier, while weeds and thorny bushes below are tangled into almost impenetrable thickets. Here is a hospice for the buffeted birds, and as soon as I step into its shelter, and catch my breath again, I begin to hear dozens of them, though not one is yet to be seen. Another plunge forward in the slippery drifts, and, lo! a robin bursts out of a leafy covert at my elbow, scattering wingfuls of snow from the brittle old leaves, and springing a harsh alarm that instantly hushes the twittering gossip.

What a queer, pretty picture it is that greets me as I turn my back to the rushing flakes, and so get my eyes open to look at it! Beyond a wide swale, that yesterday was gold and green but now is glistening wintry white, rises a small eminence where a dissolving view of trees and buildings is momently formed, then hidden, then brought out again, mirage-like, in the most curious and dreamlike unreality,

yet always with singular beauty. Gray is the only color-a soft, purplish, silvery gray; and the silhouette the only style of drawing. By their outlines I guess that that wavering slender spike amid the glistening haze is the church steeple that, squarish blur the belfry of the court-house -the next irregular smudge a certain collection of house-roofs; but all seem as foreign and unsubstantial as shadows, so quaintly are they now clouded, now lightly revealed, by the swirling, satiny snowflakes that fill the air with particles luminous in themselves yet obscuring the landscape.

Suddenly, dark midgets attract my attention, and, pulling my cap over my eyes, I wade out into the meadow where weeds and grasses stand thick above the snow. Tough and elastic are these thin old plantstems that have kept their erectness all winter; and wild parsnips by the hundreds are holding up their hands with fingers clustered to catch fistfuls of this late cloudbounty, like children in the earliest autumn flurry, eager to welcome the coming of sliding and snowballing.

Gleaming merrily among these weeds, whose capsules still hold a treasure of seeds, romps a company of sparrows, amicable and industrious. The largest and most conspicuous, of course, are the juncos,

whose notes have so metallic a clink that once or twice I am deceived into thinking the distant hammering in a blacksmith's shop is their chatter in a new direction. Their slate-colored coats, buttoned high across the breast over white vests, like old-fashioned dress-suits, look positively black amid the purity of their surroundings, and they trot about nimbly on top of the snow, dragging their tails so as to leave a well-marked trail. With them are active, chippering field-sparrows, so small and colorless as to be hard to follow in the murk of the storm; a single olivehued goldfinch, silent and unhappy; and

phut-out from between my feet bursts a song-sparrow, scattering a fleecy spray like a torpedo. I stoop down and probe the hole. It is a well leading to a long tunnel beneath the bent grasses, and arched by thick snow. Twenty birds could hide there, safe and warm; and at its further end I find a half-made nest, soaked and sodden, yet well worth finishing, no doubt, after it has dried. This submersion must be a frequent mishap to this and other early birds, which catch something besides worms in our mutable climate; but had the owner gone so far as to have been sitting on eggs, doubtless she would have kept at her brooding and

I followed those plucky meadow-birds that day perhaps two hundred yards, wading through the snow and matted herbage, and I thought it fun. It gave a new view of everything; and the rascals paid so little attention to the bad weather that I would have been ashamed to shirk it. Then up the hill I went, through briers and brush and laden trees, fairly floundering in the snow, hearing but not seeing a crow whose querulous tone betrayed an almost despairing loneliness and disgust, and then struggled across a bleak upland, where winter came and went at thirty miles an hour, to a road that wormed down through a shady cutting to my copse.

Here was shelter, and the birds knew it. I saw one fool of a robin (robins are mostly fools) hunched up, shivering and disconsolate, on an exposed twig where he could hardly keep his balance, as though he didn't care whether he lived or died; but all the others had stowed themselves away in snug crannies under the overhanging crest of the bank, or were wading in a little runlet at its foot, seeking food, or roosting comfortably beneath the thatch of dense cedar-bushes, and they swore

in my attempt to learn where they were and what they were about.

Finches abounded, too, searching the bark of tree-trunks for hiding beetles and insects' eggs, plucking at old flower-heads for seeds, nibbling the dried purple fruit of the brier, chirping and chatting cheerily, but never singing-except one sort, which kept high up in the tree-tops. It sang a bright, sweet, warbler-like lay, not often repeated, but breathing the spirit of sunshine and summer and green leaves in a way wonderfully inspiriting in this whirl of cold and snow. The delicate notes fairly sparkled as they eddied away with the flakes, and probably were those of the tree-sparrow-a Northern cousin of the chippy.

During March the buds swell with sap and new energy; many forest trees begin to flower, to the delight of the kinglets and white-throated sparrows, some even before they put forth their leaves; and patches of meadow and hillside grow emerald-green with new grass, and are dotted with delicate blue and white and yellow cwers. The bluebird seeks its mate; the robin has already found one, and begun its nest; the song-sparrow is caroling to his love from every brush-pile; the