As yet the birds have not taken all of the scarlet berries of the bitter-sweet vine, which clings lovingly, but with a somewhat parasitical clasp about the hospitable boles of the great trees. In color rivalry looms up the dark red panicles of the sumach, whose acrid fruit, which is a last resort for hungry birds, must prove a pungent pill to the feathered folk. But it is a line of beauty across the hillside: Like glowing lava streams the sumach crawls Upon the mountain’s granite walls. Peeping out from the sheltered crannies are numerous long, slender fronds of the Christmas fern, Polystichum acrostichoides, gleaming like emerald bars against the white of the snow bank. Outlining against the sky are the aristocratic hemlocks which belong to the regal pine family, and which have established a social precedence by wearing their holiday clothes all the year round, in opposition to their more humble, deciduous kin, who are now in working habiliments, and they flaunt their heads haughtily, but their thickly clothed branches form a warm shelter for snow bound birds, so that their distinction is not without its advantages. In a sheltered nook still flourish a few plants of “Life Everlastin’,” so dear to the hearts of Mary Wilkin’s quaint New England characters as an allayer of rheumatic ills, and it still exhales its aromatic fragrance in the air. Here and there a witch-hazel waves its scraggy branches, still laden with their velvety seed capsules, which have but now bursted open and shot forth their glistening seeds, and whose inconsequent yellow bloom has only just shed its slender petals to the winds. A few lingering wild rose haws are withering upon the parent stem, yet glowing like cherries against the wintry sky, but break off a tiny branch and a whiff of Richard Jefferies’ “sweet briar wind” is wafted across one’s nostrils, filling one’s brain with visions of the gladdening spring time. A gaily plumaged jay dashes his brilliant blue through the branches of a thickly needled pine, and a scarlet crowned “downie” taps diligently up and around the worm-infested trunk of an old apple tree, in search of an unwary morsel, and one comes to the conclusion that after all, winter is not all gloom and grayness, but filled with bits of glowing color and vitality, if only one’s eye is set for its beauty, instead of its bleakness. Alberta Field. HOW A CAT SAVED THE LIFE OF A CANARY. In a small town in Minnesota, noted for its several state institutions of learning, lives a widow whose success in the training of a cat has made her quite noted in her locality.