But wintering here has terrible risks which few can run. Scarcely in autumn have the leaves begun to drop from their high perches silently downward when the birds begin to drop away from the bare boughs silently southward. Lo! Some morning the leaves are on the ground and the birds have vanished.
The species that remain, or that come to us then, wear the hues of the season and melt into the tone of Natures background—blues, grays, browns, with touches of white on tail and breast and wing for coming flakes of snow.
March has gone like its winds. The other night, as I lay awake, there fell from the upper air the notes of the wildgander as he wedged his way onward by faith, not by sight, toward his distant bourn. I rose and, throwing open the shutters, strained eyes toward the unseen explorer, startled, as a halfasleep soldier might be startled by the faint buglecall of his commander blown to him from the clouds. What faroff lands, streaked with mortal dawn, does he believe in?
March is a month when the needle of my nature dips toward the country. I am away, greeting everything as it wakes out of a winter sleep, stretches arms upward and legs downward, and drinks goblet after goblet of young sunshine. I must find the darkgreen snowdrop, and sometimes help to remove from her head, as she lifts it slowly from her couch, the frosted nightcap which the old nurse would insist that she should wear.
The palegreen tips of daffodils are a thing of beauty. There is the sunstruck brook of the field, underneath the thin ice of which drops form and fall, form and fall like big, round, silvery eyes that grow bigger and brighter with astonishment that you should laugh at them as they vanish.
But most I love to see Nature do her spring house cleaning in Kentucky, with the rainclouds for her waterbuckets, and the wind for her brooms. What an amount of drenching and sweeping she can do in a day! How she dashes pailfuls into every dirty corner, till the whole earth is as clean as a new floor!
