try Chick flew that morning, and every single one
of them had been locked tight with an icy key. The day was very cold.
Soon after the ice-storm, the mercury in the thermometer over at the
Farm-House had dropped way down below the zero mark, and the wind was in
the north. But the cold did not matter if Chick could find food. His
feet were bare; but that did not matter, either, if he could eat.
Nothing mattered to the brave little black-capped fellow, except that he
was hungry, oh, so hungry! and he had heard no call from anywhere to
tell him that any other bird had found a breakfast, either.

No, the birds were all quiet, and the distant church-bells had stopped
their chimes, and the world was still. Still, except for the click of
the icicles on the twigs when Chick or the wind shook them.

Then, suddenly, there was a sound so big and deep that it seemed to fill
all the space from the white earth below to the blue sky above. A
roaring BOOOOOOOM, which was something like the waves rushing against a
rocky shore, and something like distant thunder, and something like the
noise of a great tree crashing to the earth after it has been cut, and
something like the sound that comes before an earthquake.

It is not strange that Chick did not know that sound. No one ever hears
anything just like it, unless he is out where the snow is very light and
very deep and covered with a crust.

Then, if the crust is broken suddenly in one place, it may settle like
the top of a puffed-up pie that is pricked; and the air that has been
prisoned under the crust is pushed out with a strange and mighty sound.

So that big BOOOOOOOM meant that something had broken the icy crust
which, a moment before, had lain over the soft snow, all whole, for a
mile one way and a mile another way, and half a mile to the Farm-House.

Yes, there was the Farmer Boy coming across the field, to the orchard
that stood on the sandy hillside near the fir forest. He was walking on
snowshoes, which cracked the crust now and then; and twice on the way to
the orchard he heard a deep BOOOOOOOM, which he loved just as much as he
loved the silence of the field when he stopped to listen now and then.
For the winter sounds were so dear to the Farmer Boy who lived at the
edge of Christmas-tree Land, that he would never forget them even when
he should become a man. He would always remember the snowshoe tramps
across the meadow; and in after years, when his shoulders held burde