There are patches of moss on gray rocks and tree trunks. Fairy islands of it, that will not be greener when they are wet with summer showers, arise among the brown expanse of dead leaves. The gray mist of branches and undergrowth is enlivened with a tinge of purple. Here and there the tawny mat beneath is uplifted by the struggling plant life below it or pierced through by an underthrust of a sprouting seed. There is a promise of bloom in blushing arbutus buds, a promise even now fulfilled by the first squirrelcups just out of their furry bracts and already calling the bees abroad. Flies are buzzing to and fro in busy idleness, and a cricket stirs the leaves with a sudden spasm of movement. The first of the seventeen butterflies that shall give boys the freedom of bare feet goes wavering past like a drifting blossom. A cradle knoll invites you to a seat on the soft, warm cushion of dead leaves and living moss and purple sprigs of wintergreen with their blobs of scarlet berries, which have grown redder and plumper under every snow of the winter. This smoothly rounded mound and the hollow scooped beside it, brimful now of amber, sun-warmed water, mark the ancient place of a great tree that was dead and buried, and all traces by which its kind could be identified were mouldered away and obliterated, before you were born. The incessant crackling purr of the wood-frogs is interrupted at your approach, and they disappear till the wrinkled surface of the oblong pool grows smooth again and you perceive them sprawled along the bottom on the leaf paving of their own color. As you cast a casual glance on your prospective seat, carelessly noting the mingling of many hues, the brightness of the berries seems most conspicuous, till a moving curved and recurved gleam of gold on black and a flickering flash of red catch your eye and startle you with an involuntary revulsion. With charmed eyes held by this new object, you grope blindly for a stick or stone. But, if you find either, forbear to strike. Do not blot out one token of spring's awakening nor destroy one life that rejoices in it, even though it be so humble a life as that of a poor garter-snake. He is so harmless to man, that, were it not for the old, unreasoning antipathy, our hands would not be raised against him; and, if he were not a snake, we should call him beautiful in his stripes of black and gold, and in graceful motion--a motion that charms us in the undulation of waves, in their flickering reflections of sunlight on rushy margins and wooded shores, in the winding of a brook through a meadow, in the flutter of a pennant and the flaunting of a banner, the ripple of wind-swept meadow and grain field, and the sway of leafy boughs. His colors are fresh and bright as ever you will see them, though he has but to-day awakened from a long sleep in continual darkness.