Still higher in the woodpile are white birches, yet in the smooth skin of their prime, which is fit to be fashioned into drinking cups and berry baskets, or to furnish a page for my lady's album. Here are hardhacks, some with grain winding like the grooves of a rifle. This is the timber the Indians made their bows of, and which now serves the same purpose for the young savages whom we have always with us. There are sinewy blue beeches, slowly grown up from ox-goads and the "beech seals" of Ethan Allen's Green Mountain Boys to the girth of a man's thigh, a size at which they mostly stop growing. A smaller trunk, like yet unlike them, sets folks to guessing what kind of wood it is. He will hit the mark who fires at random the names "shadblow," "service-berry," or "amelanchier." If the axe had been merciful, in early May its branches would have been as white with blossoms as if the last April snow still clung to them. Tossed on a-top of all is a jumbled thatch of small stuff,--saplings improvidently cut, short-lived striped maple, and dogwood, the slender topmost lengths of great trees, once the perches of hawks and crows, and such large branches as were not too crooked to lie still on the sled. The snow-fleas, harbingers and attendants of thaws, are making the snow in the woods gray with their restless myriads, when the sled makes its last trip across the slushy fields, which are fast turning from white to dun under the March winds and showers and sunshine. The completed woodpile basks in the growing warmth, as responsive to the touch of spring as if every trunk yet upheld its branches in the forest. The buds swell on every chance-spared twig, and sap starts from the severed ducts. From the pine drip slowly lengthening stalactites of amber, from the hickory thick beads of honeydew, and from the maples a flow of sweet that calls the bees from their hives across the melting drifts. Their busy hum makes an island of summer sound in the midst of the silent ebbing tide of winter.