BY WINTHROP PACKARD AUTHOR OF “WILD PASTURES” [Image unavailable.] BOSTON SMALL, MAYNARD AND COMPANY PUBLISHERS Copyright, 1909 By Small, Maynard and Company (INCORPORATED) Entered at Stationers’ Hall THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, CAMBRIDGE, U.S.A.   The author wishes to express his thanks to the “Boston Transcript” for permission to reprint in this volume matter which was originally contributed to its columns....

T O-DAY came with a flashing sun that looked through crystal-clear atmosphere into the eyes of a keen northwest wind that had dried up all of November’s fog and left no trace of moisture to hold its keenness and touch you with its chill. It was one of those days when the cart road from the north side to the south side of a pine wood leads you from early December straight to early May. On the one side is a nipping and eager air; on the other sunny softness and a smell of spring. It is more than t

T HE lonesomest spot in all the pasture, the one which the winter has made most vacant of all, is the corner where hangs the great gray nest of the white-faced hornets. Its door stands hospitably open but it is no longer thronged with burly burghers roaring to and fro on business that cannot wait. It was wide enough for half a dozen to go and come at the same time, yet they used to jostle one another continually in this entrance, so great was the throng of workers and so vigorous the energy that

T OWARD midnight the pond fell asleep. All day long it had frolicked with the boisterous north wind, pretending to frown and turn black in the face when the cold shoulders of the gale bore down upon its surface, dimpling as the pressure left it and sparkling in brilliant glee as the low hung sun laughed across its ruffles. The wind went down with the sun, as north winds often do, and left a clear mirror stretching from shore to shore, and reflecting the cold yellow of the winter twilight. As thi

T HE spring of this, our new year of 1909, is set by the wise makers of calendars to begin at the vernal equinox, say the twenty-first of March, but the weatherwise know that on that date eastern Massachusetts is still in the thrall of winter, and spring, as they see it, is not due till a month later. Yet they are both wrong, and we need but go into the woods now to prove it. The spring in fact is already here. The new life in which it is to express itself in a thousand forms is already growing

T OWARD morning the south rain, whose downpour was the climax of the January thaw, ceased, and in the warm silence that followed Great Blue Hill seemed like a gigantic puffball growing out of the moist twilight into the dryer upper atmosphere of dawn. Standing on its rounded dome you had a singular sense of being swung with it upward and eastward to meet the light. At such times the whirling of the earth on its axis is so very real that one wonders that the ancients did not discover it long befo

I T seems to be our lot this winter to have April continually smiling up in the face of January. Again and again the north wind has come down upon us and set his adamantine face against all such folly. The turf has become flint; the ice has been eight inches thick on pond and placid stream, and the very next morning, maybe, the soft air has breathed of spring, and bluebirds have twittered deprecatingly as if glad to be here, but altogether ashamed to be found so out of season. As a matter of fac

I HAVEN’t seen my friend the cottontailed rabbit for some days. All the winter, so far, he has frequented his little summer camp on the southern slope of the hill, well up toward the top, among the red oaks. Here in a little tangle of tiny undergrowth and brown leaves, with a fallen trunk for overhead shelter, you might find him any forenoon. He had backed into this place and trampled and snuggled till he had a round and cosy form just a bit bigger than himself, where the sun might warm him unti

I WISH I could have seen the country about the great spring which goes by the name, locally, of “Fountain Head” the year that the clock stopped for the glaciers hereabout. That year when the last bit of the ice cap, that for ages had slid down across southeastern Massachusetts and built up its inextricable confusion of sand and gravel moraines, melted away, would have shown a thousand great springs like it, bubbling up all through the region, almost invariably from the northerly base of gravelly

T HE snow came out of the north at a temperature of only twenty degrees above zero, yet, strange to say, for some hours it came damp and froze immediately on every tree-trunk or twig that it struck. The temperature remained the same all day and through the night, but the streak of soft weather somewhere up above which was responsible for the damp snow soon passed away and frozen crystals sifted down that had in them no suspicion of moisture. Yet these tangled tips with those already frozen firml

T WO days of greedy south wind had licked up the crisp snow till all the fields and southerly slopes were bare. Then came the lull before the north wind should come back, a lull in which you had but to sniff the air to smell the coming spring; its faint perfume crisped with a frosty odor that lured the senses like a flavor of stephanotis frappé. It was a day that tempts a man to take staff and scrip and climb the hills due south to meet the romance the two days’ wind has brought from far down th

I ALWAYS know the sound of the east wind as it comes over the Blue Hills for the twanging of the bow from which winter has shot his Parthian arrow. The keenest it is in all his quiver of keen darts, for it penetrates joints in one’s armor that no gale from Arctic barrens has been able to reach, that no fall of snow or of temperature has weakened. Facing it to-day and feeling its barbs turn in the marrow of my breastbone as I crossed Ponkapoag Pond I began to wonder how it fared with my friends t

I N the winter the pond finds a voice. The great sheet of foot-thick, white ice is like a gigantic disk in a telephone, receiver and transmitter in one, sending and receiving messages between the earth and space. Probably these messages pass equally in summer, only the instruments are so tuned then that our finite ears may not perceive them; for the surface of the pond has its water disk in the summer no less than in winter, but an exquisitely thinner and finer one. Taking to-day my first canoe