As the days grow warmer, the woodpile invites idlers as well as busy bees and wood-cutters. The big logs are comfortable seats to lounge on while whittling a pine chip, and breathing the mingled odors of the many woods freshly cut and the indescribable woodsy smell brought home in the bark and moss, and listening to the hum of the bees and harsher music of the saws and axe, the sharp, quick swish of the whip-saw, the longer drawn and deeper ring of the crosscut, and the regular beat of the axe,--fiddle, bass-viol, and drum, each with its own time, but all somehow in tune. The parts stop a little when the fiddler saws off his string, the two drawers of the long bass-viol bow sever theirs, and the drummer splits his drum, but each is soon outfitted again, and the funeral march of the woodpile goes on. Here is the most delightful of places for those busy idlers the children, for it is full of pioneers' and hunters' cabins, robbers' caves and bears' dens, and of treasures of moss and gum and birch, and of punk, the tinder of the Indians and our forefathers, now gone out of use except for some conservative Canuck to light his pipe or for boys to touch off their small ordnance. It is a pretty sight to watch the nuthatches and titmice searching the grooves of the bark for their slender fare, or a woodpecker chopping his best for a living with his sharp-pointed axe, all having followed their rightful possessions from the woods, taking perhaps the track of the sled. It is wonderful to hear the auger of the pine-borer, now thawed into life, crunching its unseen way through the wood. Then there is always the chance of the axe unlocking the stores of deermice, quarts of beechnuts with all the shells neatly peeled off; and what if it should happen to open a wild-bee hive full of honey! If the man comes who made the round of the barns in the fall and early winter with his threshing-machine, having exchanged it for a sawing machine, he makes short work of our woodpile. A day or two of stumbling clatter of the horses in their treadmill, and the buzzing and screeching of the whirling saw, gnaws it into a heap of blocks. Our lounging-place and the children's wooden playground have gone, and all the picturesqueness and woodsiness have disappeared as completely as when splitting has made only firewood of the pile. It will give warmth and comfort from the stove, but in that black sepulchre all its beauty is swallowed out of sight forever. If it can go to a generous fireplace, it is beautified again in the glowing and fading embers that paint innumerable shifting pictures, while the leaping flames sing the old song of the wind in the branches. L A CENTURY OF EXTERMINATION