bly as old as weather wisdom says:

"Long foretold, long last;
Short notice, soon past."

So as the air and Aunt Sue both prophesied for weeks without
fulfilment, all the weather-wise world knew the storm would be a
good one when it did come. Meanwhile the steady, increasing cold
put all the woodland into winter quarters. The ground froze, as we
say, meaning that the moisture in it became ice to a depth of
several inches, making an almost impenetrable ice blanket through
which the most severe winter weather will work but slowly. Beneath
this, or even in it, all burrowing roots, animals and insects are
safe from freezing. Where the ground is packed hard, the flinty
combination of ice and grit goes deepest, though even in exposed
situations only to a depth of three feet or so. The woodchucks
asleep in their burrows, the snakes, torpid in their holes, are as
safe from frost-bite as if they had migrated to the shores of the
Gulf of Mexico. The rootlets of small, perennial herbs may be
encased in ice to their tips, but they do not freeze. The heat
which the surrounding moisture gives up in changing to ice,
combined with their own self-generated warmth, keeps them just
above the freezing temperature and they live through it in safety.
The same rootlets laid bare to the frost of a single October night
die. The ice which seems to menace them is in fact their armor. So
it is with countless numbers of burrowing insects. The frozen
ground which seems so dead is full of waiting life which the very
frost that threatens to kill instead protects. Last September I
watched two larvae of the rather common moth, Protoparce sexta,
the tomato sphinx. Great fat green fellows as large as one's
thumb, they were, each with a spine-like thorn cocked jauntily on
his rear segment. They had fattened on my tomato vines until they
had reached their full growth and were ready to go into the cocoon
stage, in winter quarters. They dropped from the vines and began
to wander hastily, but seemingly aimlessly, on the ground beneath.
But careful watching showed that each was poking at the ground
every few lengths as he crawled, seeking a situation that suited
him. Before long each had started to burrow, going into the earth
slowly and laboriously, but steadily worming a way in. Each went
out of sight, leaving a hole just his own size behind him, such a
hole as I might have made by pressure with a round stick. A week
later I dug them up. They had gone