As I stopped on the porch with my pitcher, the open door made a long lane of light. Just across the creek, not fifty feet away, sounded a crash in the brush, and there in the spotlight, held by the glare, stood a big buck. For a moment I looked right into his beautiful, liquid, gleaming eyes. Then, with a snort, he plunged into the woods and was gone. For years I had tramped through the barrens and had found the tracks of the deer that still live not thirty miles from the third largest city in America, but until that night I had never seen one. It grew colder and colder, and the little cabin snapped and cracked with the frost. Banking up the fireplace with logs, I pulled my bed up into the circle of heat, and fell asleep to the flickering of the fire and the croon of the wind among the pine trees outside. Through the window I could see the winter sky ablaze with stars, while the late moon shone like a bowl of frozen gold through the black tree-trunks. The next morning I had to leave on the nine-o'clock train; and so I rose early and after breakfast took a last walk down to Lower Mill and back, to see if I could add any more winter birds to my list. It was a cold, clear, snapping winter morning, and as the sun came up through the pine trees I met first one and then another of the bird-folk abroad after their breakfasts. First I heard the "Pip, pip!" of the downy woodpecker, all black and white, with a bloodstain at the back of his head. He is a tree-climber who can go up a tree head-foremost, but must always back down. The nuthatches, with their white cheeks and grunting notes, can go up and down a tree either head-first or tail-first and the last of the tree-climbers, the brown creeper, climbs up in a spiral, but has to fly down. Farther on, I heard the call of the big hairy woodpecker, which looks almost like the downy except that he is nearly twice as large. He was drilling a hole in the under side of a branch and sucking out hibernating ants with his long, sticky trident tongue. Next came a tree sparrow, with his white wing-bar and brown-red patch on the crown of his head. He was busily scratching on the ground; he is called a tree sparrow because never by any chance is he found in a tree. On the side of a white-oak tree a bit of bark seemed to move upward in a spiral, and I recognized the brown creeper, the last of the climbers. He went up the tree in a series of tiny hops and then, true to his training, flew down and started up again. As I turned the curve by Lower Mill, I saw in a thicket near the dam a number of white-throated sparrows, with their striped white heads and white throat-patches. Near them suddenly hopped a bird that ought to have been far south. It was reddish brown with a long tail, and I recognized the female chewink. She hopped around and scratched among the leaves like a little hen, in true chewink style, as if the month were April instead of January.