Altogether, with the cloudless, mild days, the birds, the tree-frogs, the butterflies, and the flowers, November did not seem the bleak and cheerless season it has commonly been painted. Still it was not exactly like summer. On the last day I saw some very small boys skating on the Cambridge marshes, and the next morning December showed its hand promptly, sending the mercury down to within two or three degrees of zero. NEW ENGLAND WINTER. While I enjoy the friendship of the seasons, I trust that nothing can make life a burden to me.--THOREAU. Those who will have us all to be studying the Sacred Books of the East, and other such literature, are given to laying it down as an axiom that whoever knows only one religion knows none at all,--an assertion, I am bound to acknowledge, that commends itself to my reason, notwithstanding the somewhat serious inferences fairly deducible from it touching the nature and worth of certain convictions of my own, which I have been wont to look upon as religious. I cannot profess ever to have pried into the mysteries of any faith except Christianity. So, of course, I do not understand even that. And the people about me, so far as I can discover, are all in the same predicament. Yet I would fain believe that we are not exactly heathen. Some of my neighbors (none too many of them, I confess) are charitable and devout. They must be pleasing to their Creator, I say to myself, unless He is hard to please. Sometimes I go so far as to think that possibly a man may be religious without _knowing_ even his own religion. Let us hope so. Otherwise, we of the laity are assuredly undone. And what is true of creeds and churches is true likewise of countries and climates. We grow wise by comparison of one thing with another, not by direct and exclusive contemplation of one thing by itself. Human knowledge is relative, not absolute, and the inveterate stayer at home is but a poor judge of his own birthplace. All this I have in lively remembrance as I sit down to record some impressions of our New England winter. With what propriety do I discourse upon winter in Massachusetts, having never passed one anywhere else? Had I spent a portion of my life where roses bloom the year round, then, to be sure, I might assume to say something to the purpose about snow and ice.