beneath the ashes. I put it in my pocket and went
about my work. After a little time, remembering my mouse, I put
my hand into my pocket and touched something very warm and
lively. The ember had been fanned into a flame, so to speak. I
kept my captive in a cage a day or two and then returned it to
the woods, where I trust it found a safe retreat against the
cold.

VII

BIRD LIFE IN WINTER

The distribution of our birds over the country in summer is like
that of the people, quite uniform. Every wood and field has its
quota, and no place so barren but it has some bird to visit it.
One knows where to look for sparrows and thrushes and bobolinks
and warblers and flycatchers. But the occupation of the country
by our winter residents is like the Indian occupation of the
land. They are found in little bands, a few here and there, with
large tracts quite untenanted.

One may walk for hours through the winter woods and not see or
hear a bird. Then he may come upon a troop of chickadees, with a
nuthatch or two in their wake, and maybe a downy woodpecker.
Birds not of a feather flock together at this inclement season.
The question of food is always an urgent one. Evidently the
nuthatch thinks there must be food where the chickadees flit and
call so cheerily, and the woodpecker is probably drawn to the
nuthatch for a similar reason.

Together they make a pretty thorough search,--fine, finer,
finest. The chickadee explores the twigs and smaller branches;
what he gets is on the surface, and so fine as to be almost
microscopic. The nuthatch explores the trunks and larger branches
of the trees; he goes a little deeper, into crevices of the bark
and under lichens. Then comes Downy, who goes deeper still. He
bores for larger game through the bark, and into the trunks and
branches themselves.

In late fall this band is often joined by the golden-crowned
kinglet and the brown creeper. The kinglet is finer-eyed and
finer-billed than even the chickadee, and no doubt gathers what
the latter overlooks, while the brown creeper, with his long,
slender, curved bill, takes what both the nuthatch and the
woodpecker miss. Working together, it seems as if they must make
a pretty clean sweep. But the trees are numerous and large, and
the birds are few. Only a mere fraction of tree surface is
searched over at any one time. In large forests probably only a
mere fraction of the trees are visited at all.

One cold day in midwinter, w