of creation is Love." To observe the tracks of the wild creatures in the woods is another joy of the winter walk. Now all the forest regions would be full of squirrels, rabbits, foxes and others of their kin, of grouse and woodcock, too,-were it not for the hunters, who almost outnumber the game. The woodland on our western hills abounded in these charming creatures, 40 years ago, but now there are probably more gray squirrels in Springfield streets than there are on Mount Tom or Mount Holyoke. It is probable that city protection may yet be the only means to preserve them. Old men, who used to see gray and red and striped squirrels by scores and hundreds in the course of a year, now tell us that they scarcely see one gray squirrel in a summer, a few more red squirrels, and quite a number of chipmunks. It seems a pity. But yet their footprints are to be discerned in the less hunted woods, and it is a delight to come upon a great fallen tree where these rodents have eaten their feast of nuts, and to discover in the snow the little excavations where they have dug to recover the hickory nuts they had buried in the fall.

Of other delights of the winter walk,—of the frozen ponds, of the cliffs over which trickling rills have festooned grand icicles, a rod long, or have poured in great floods and remain frozen,

with the water gurgling and glowing beneath,of the miniature cyclones of snow-wreaths, that swing into the air on a sudden and go skurrying down the sidehills and over the plains,―of these and many more phenomena of the country in winter, there is not time to say. But there is no more charming and recompensing season than this for acquaintance with the glory and grace of Nature.

A Prophesying Day

HESE bright March days at the end of
January rather worry the progress of the

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seasons, and when one sees the aments of the alders crimsoning, and plucks the pussy willows, and actually discovers the skunk cabbage thrusting its close-wrapt hood two inches above the moist and warmth of the swale, he feels much as if he had encountered a boy with a straw hat. It is a surprising winter. Notwithstanding our occasional spells of zero weather, or near it, southern exposures in this region where one cannot thrust a walking stick deep into the roadside bank must be few. There is little frost in the ground, and there is the peculiar spring feeling in the atmosphere-a reviving, aspirant impulse, which makes one for the time forget. But, after all, what if the temperature lowers and the northwesters roar? Has not the promise been given and felt, and the prayer of gratitude been uttered?

The moving of the sleepless, pauseless spirit of

life, that does not wait for months and days, but manifests where and when it will, rebuking our shallow and tenuous faith with witnesses to its gentle energies,-that it is which lifts above the frosts, the snow, the ice, the hardened earthsurface of winter, the assurance of summer. It is truly summer that is our keynote of the year, and not winter. There are indeed few days of the cold season's calendar when we cannot hear that note in the pines and spruces and hemlocks, but chiefly in the white pines; when we cannot listen to its echo in the prattle of the brook. While in our ardent summer there are few days in many years that bring the memory of frost to our consciousness, there are many days in winter which open all the year to our entry. When we

wander in the fields and see the brooklime fresh and green, and ready for the spring; when on a forest bank we note the arbutus buds prepared for the first opportunity of spring bloom; when we note the preparation of the alder, the sweet fern, the blueberry, the azalea, the mountain laurel and so many other shrubs; when we observe the sand violet's foot leaves and the most beautiful St. John's wort, the evening primrose, the robin's plantain, the saxifrage, the golden-rods, we can but feel that the perpetual truth is summer, just as the perpetual truth is life.

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The

year

Beneath a great

is full of summer. hemlock whose myriad branches and boughs sway in the west winds, what is more sure than the real new year no calendar convention, but the time when the forces of growth are at once let loose, and the voice of the Lord is heard among the trees of the garden! That voice is never silent, though it be a still, small voice, and only the prophets of the Lord may hear it. Among these prophets are the mosses and lichens, which take occasion for their renewing life in the wintry landscape. For now it is that delicately bright red dots and delicately green cups appear upon the stumps of felled trees, and the green mosses at the roots of trees begin to deepen their hues and start in their lowest roots the slender stems that shall bear their hidden fruits. Never does Nature rest; and though the skunk cabbage may not yet unfold its tight wrappings and project its full crimson-streaked hood and open the starry blossoms of its inner club,-here is the marvelous prophesy of spring in what it has already done.

As the summer heats furnish their days of prediction of fall and the suspense of the glorious manifests of the forests and the fields, so that in a July day one may sense in the air the coming of October, so in January we catch the whole character of March, the month of hope. By such