ore heat, and the
hills are but April snow-banks. Nature has but two forms, the cell and
the crystal,--the crystal first, the cell last. All organic nature is
built up of the cell; all inorganic, of the crystal. Cell upon cell
rises the vegetable, rises the animal; crystal wedded to and compacted
with crystal stretches the earth beneath them. See in the falling snow
the old cooling and precipitation, and the shooting, radiating forms
that are the architects of planet and globe.

We love the sight of the brown and ruddy earth; it is the color of
life, while a snow-covered plain is the face of death; yet snow is but
the mask of the life-giving rain; it, too, is the friend of man,--the
tender, sculpturesque, immaculate, warming, fertilizing snow.

II

WINTER NEIGHBORS

The country is more of a wilderness, more of a wild solitude, in the
winter than in the summer. The wild comes out. The urban, the
cultivated, is hidden or negatived. You shall hardly know a good field
from a poor, a meadow from a pasture, a park from a forest. Lines and
boundaries are disregarded; gates and bar-ways are unclosed; man lets
go his hold upon the earth; title-deeds are deep buried beneath the
snow; the best-kept grounds relapse to a state of nature; under the
pressure of the cold, all the wild creatures become outlaws, and roam
abroad beyond their usual haunts. The partridge comes to the orchard
for buds; the rabbit comes to the garden and lawn; the crows and jays
come to the ash-heap and corn-crib, the snow buntings to the stack and
to the barnyard; the sparrows pilfer from the domestic fowls; the pine
grosbeak comes down from the north and shears your maples of their
buds; the fox prowls about your premises at night; and the red
squirrels find your grain in the barn or steal the butternuts from
your attic. In fact, winter, like some great calamity, changes the
status of most creatures and sets them adrift. Winter, like poverty,
makes us acquainted with strange bedfellows.

[Illustration: OUT FOR A WALK]

For my part, my nearest approach to a strange bedfellow is the little
gray rabbit that has taken up her abode under my study floor. As she
spends the day here and is out larking at night, she is not much of a
bedfellow, after all. It is probable that I disturb her slumbers more
than she does mine. I think she is some support to me under there,--a
silent, wide-eyed