"Say! but you're as barefaced as the house." Colin hugged himself with a sense of having got off a good joke as he watched Leon boldly raise the loose window and deposit the present within. "Let's put for the woods now!" he added, the deed accomplished. And the two scouts climbed the uplands toward those midwinter woods that crowned the heights in dismantled majesty. But they were not robbed of beauty, the December woods: the frosty sunshine knew that as it picked out the berry-laden black alders displaying their coral branches against the velvet background of a pine, and embraced the regiment of hemlock bushes, green dwarfs which, together with their full-sized brothers, held the fort for spring against all the hosts of winter. "Whee-ew! I think the woods are just dandy at this time o' year!" Leon led a whistling onslaught upon the vividly laden black alder bushes, while the white gusts of the boys' breath floated like incense through the coral and evergreen sanctuary of beauty, guarded by the silvery pillars of white birch-trees, where, in the bare forest, Nature had not left herself without a witness to joy and color. "These berries are as red as Varney's Paintpot," laughed Colin by and by, as the two scouts retraced their steps across the salt-marshes, crunching underfoot the frozen spikes of yellow marsh-grass. "Well, we had a great time on that day when we found the old Paintpot--though we succeeded in getting lost!" "We surely did! I wonder if the frost will hold, so that we'll have some good skating after Christmas? It's freezing now." Leon's gaze strayed ahead to the solid white surface of the tidal river, stained with amber by the setting sun. They were within a hundred yards of it by this time, and caught the shrill cries and yells of boyish laughter from youthful skaters who careered and pirouetted at a short, safe distance from the bank. But a clear view of what was going on was shut off from the two berry-laden scouts, crossing the saffron marshes at a leisurely pace, by some tumble-down sheds that intervened between them and the river. "Well, the kids seem to be having a good time on the ice anyhow--though I don't think it can be very firm yet. Whew! what's that?" exclaimed Colin suddenly, as a piercing cry came ringing from the river-bank whereon each blade of the coarse beach-grass glittered like a jeweled spike under the waning sunlight. "Oh! _somebody_ is blowing off the smoke of his troubles," laughed Leon unconcernedly. The afternoon was so sharply delectable, with the sky all pale gold in the west, flinging them a remote, lukewarm smile like a Christmas greeting from some half-reminiscent friend, the hearts of the two scouts reflecting the beauty of the Christmas woods were so elated that they could not all in a moment slide down from Mount Happiness into the valley where danger and pain become realities.