most of their time while Jack Frost spares
the insect life. The chickadees, nature's acrobats, turn somersaults
among the branches in sheer defiance of the law of gravitation. The
cares of summer are over and done with. The woes of winter do not
terrify this morsel of india rubber and compressed air. The English
sparrow pursues his ubiquitous search for food with insular disdain of
everything he does not understand. He has penetrated our sylvan
retreats and secured a foothold here by the most impudent of squatter
claims. He lives and multiplies by dint of a systematic disregard of
everybody's rights. The manners and the morals of the great city cling
to him. He will have nothing in common with our country ways. He brings
with him the blight of civilization.

THE JESTER

Myths from earth's childhood tell
Of Godhood visible,--
Indra, the azure-skied,
Four-handed, thousand-eyed;
Far-wandering Isis, chief
Lady of Love and Grief;
Zeus, on each rash revolt
Hurling the thunderbolt;
Woden of warrior form
Gray-mantled with the storm;
Lir of the foam-white hair,
Mad with the sea's despair.

But of those Splendors who
Conceived the kangaroo,
With gesture humorous
Shaped hippopotamus,
Intoned the donkey's bray
And, in an hour of play,
Taught peacocks how to strut?
Holy is Allah, but
Is holiness expressed
In hedgehogs? Whence the jest?
Even in creation's dawn
Was Puck with Oberon?

EMILIUS

"O, I could beat my infinite blockhead."

--Jonson's _The Devil is an Ass_.

Professor Emily has the kindest heart in the world and is always doing
good. Her charities would make a rosary more fragrant than sandal-buds.
And yet, perhaps, one time out of a thousand, her intention and her
action trip each other up.

One day in early June she met on our village sidewalk, half a mile from
the nearest pond or brook, a snapping turtle of formidable proportions,
easily weighing his twenty or twenty-five pounds. In characteristic
fashion she stopped to consider what she could do for him. Though he
was, for his own part, neither cordial nor communicative, she decided
that he must have lost his way, since the water, his natural habitat,
lay behind him, and by a dexterous application of boot and stick she
turned him about, quite against his will, so that his snout pointed
toward home. But the turtle, a surly, obstin