f light snow will be the best medicine for the pines that
we could have.

It is the air entangled among the snow crystals, then, which makes
the snow blanket, as we often call it, so sure a protection from
cold. The ground may have frozen to a considerable depth before
the snow comes, but if it stays throughout the winter there is no
frost in the earth beneath it when the spring melts it away. No
sooner is the ground protected from further freezing from above
than the greater warmth below begins to melt the frost and change
it to life-giving moisture. Because of this warmth from below the
sap stirs in the trees long before the temperature in the air
above the snow blanket has given it any warrant for such action.
It pushes up until the frost-bound trunk denies it further passage
and there waits the first brief respite in the air above. Hence in
March, though the snow may be still deep on the surface and the
mercury in the glass fall well toward zero at night, the fires are
started in the maple sugar camps and the pails hung to the trees.
We know that no sooner will the sun warm their trunks than the sap
will begin to tinkle in the pails, dripping with the sweet promise
of the spring which is already pulsing in the subsoil.

It was not a big storm, in my woods, after all. It lasted less
than twenty-four hours and hardly six inches of light snow fell.
Proverbs are half-truths, anyway, and "long foretold, long last"
has proved less than half of itself this time. But though the day
is clear and the sun bright, Aunt Sue's snowbank is lifting its
purple mass in the southeast again and, with the other Dorchester
backwoodsmen, I am wagging my head solemnly and joining in a
jeremiad concerning a big one next time. I should like to have
known Aunt Sue. I picture her as a stout, keen-eyed, wise-headed
house-mother of the old English stock. Surely she is the patron
saint of the young pines and of all others who know how to enjoy a
good old-fashioned winter. As such I hope someone will paint her,
seated on a good big snowbank, attended by cupid pines robed in
such ermine as they now wear, and with the soft radiance of a snow
rainbow around her head for an aureole.

CHAPTER XXIII

SPORTS OF THE WINTER WOODS

The time to go into the winter woods for love of them is in the
still chill of dawn when the blue-black of the west is hardly yet
touched with the purple that heralds the day, when the high sky in
the east begins