nd my favorite came back, but only to survey the ruins
of his castle for a moment and then go away. He lingered about for a
day or two and then disappeared. The big hairy usurper passed a night
in the cavity; but on being hustled out of it the next night by me, he
also left, but not till he had demolished the entrance to a cavity in
a neighboring tree where downy and his mate had reared their brood
that summer, and where I had hoped the female would pass the winter.

III

A SPRING RELISH

It is a little remarkable how regularly severe and mild winters
alternate in our climate for a series of years,--a feminine and a
masculine one, as it were, almost invariably following each other.
Every other season now for ten years the ice-gatherers on the river
have been disappointed of a full harvest, and every other season the
ice has formed from fifteen to twenty inches thick. From 1873 to 1884
there was no marked exception to this rule. But in the last-named
year, when, according to the succession, a mild winter was due, the
breed seemed to have got crossed, and a sort of mongrel winter was the
result; neither mild nor severe, but very stormy, capricious, and
disagreeable, with ice a foot thick on the river. The winter which
followed, that of 1884-85, though slow and hesitating at first, fully
proved itself as belonging to the masculine order. The present winter
of 1885-86 shows a marked return to the type of two years ago--less
hail and snow, but by no means the mild season that was due. By and
by, probably, the meteorological influences will get back into the old
ruts again, and we shall have once more the regular alternation of
mild and severe winters. During very open winters, like that of
1879-80, nature in my latitude, eighty miles north of New York, hardly
shuts up house at all. That season I heard a little piping frog on the
7th of December, and on the 18th of January, in a spring run, I saw
the common bullfrog out of his hibernaculum, evidently thinking it was
spring. A copperhead snake was killed here about the same date;
caterpillars did not seem to retire, as they usually do, but came
forth every warm day. The note of the bluebird was heard nearly every
week all winter, and occasionally that of the robin. Such open winters
make one fear that his appetite for spring will be blunted when spring
really does come; but he usually finds that the April da