istmas holiday. For weeks I had
looked longingly out of college windows as the first tracking-snows came
sifting down, my thoughts turning from books and the problems of human
wisdom to the winter woods, with their wide white pages written all over
by the feet of wild things. Then the sun would shine again, and I
knew that the records were washed clean, and the hard-packed leaves as
innocent of footmarks as the beach where plover feed when a great wave
has chased them away. On the twentieth a change came. Outside the snow
fell heavily, two days and a night; inside, books were packed away,
professors said Merry Christmas, and students were scattering, like a
bevy of flushed quail, to all points of the compass for the holidays.
The afternoon of the twenty-first found me again in my room under the
eaves of the old farmhouse.

Before dark I had taken a wide run over the hills and through the woods
to the place of my summer camp. How wonderful it all was! The great
woods were covered deep with their pure white mantle; not a fleck, not a
track soiled its even whiteness; for the last soft flakes were lingering
in the air, and fox and grouse and hare and lucivee were still keeping
the storm truce, hidden deep in their coverts. Every fir and spruce and
hemlock had gone to building fairy grottoes as the snow packed their
lower branches, under which all sorts of wonders and beauties might
be hidden, to say nothing of the wild things for whom Nature had been
building innumerable tents of white and green as they slept. The silence
was absolute, the forest's unconscious tribute to the Wonder Worker.
Even the trout brook, running black as night among its white-capped
boulders and delicate arches of frost and fern work, between massive
banks of feathery white and green, had stopped its idle chatter and
tinkled a low bell under the ice, as if only the Angelus could express
the wonder of the world.

As I came back softly in the twilight a movement in an evergreen ahead
caught my eye, and I stopped for one of the rare sights of the woods,--a
partridge going to sleep in a warm room of his own making. He looked all
about among the trees most carefully, listened, kwit-kwitted in a
low voice to himself, then, with a sudden plunge, swooped downward
head-first into the snow. I stole to the spot where he had disappeared,
noted the direction of his tunnel, and fell forward with arms
outstretched, thinking perhaps to catch him under me and examin