Like those sweet, foreseeing spirits, that on high, bare tree-tops of human thought, pour forth songs of hope in advance of their age and time, our bluebird was gifted with a sure spirit of prophecy; and, though the winds were angry and loud, though snows lay piled and deep for long weeks after, though ice and frost and hail armed themselves in embattled forces, yet the sun behind them all kept shining and shining, every day longer and longer, every day drawing nearer and nearer, till the snows passed away like a bad dream, and the brooks woke up and began to laugh and gurgle, and the ice went out of the ponds. Then the pussy-willows threw out their soft catkins, and the ferns came up with their woolly hoods on, like prudent old house-mothers, looking to see if it was yet time to unveil their tender greens, and the white blossoms of the shad-blow and the tremulous tags of the birches and alders shook themselves gayly out in the woods. Then, under brown, rustling leaf-banks, came the white, waxy shells of the trailing arbutus with its pink buds, fair as a winter’s dawn on snow; the blue and white hepaticas opened their eyes, and cold, sweet, white violets starred the moist edges of water-courses, and great blue violets opened large eyes in the shadows, and the white and crimson trilliums unfurled under the flickering lace-work shadows of the yet leafless woods; the red columbine waved its bells from the rocks, and great tufts of golden cowslips fringed the borders of the brooks. Then came in flocks the delicate wind-flower family; anemones, starry white, and the crowfoot, with its pink outer shell, and the spotted adder’s tongue, with its waving yellow bells of blossom. Then, too, the honest, great, green leaves of the old skunk-cabbage, most refreshing to the eye in its hardy, succulent greenness, though an abomination to the nose of the ill-informed who should be tempted to gather them. In a few weeks, the woods, late so frozen,—hopelessly buried in snow-drifts,—were full of a thousand beauties and delicacies of life and motion, and flowers bloomed on every hand. * * * * * [Sidenote: Autumn.]