As the trees are leafless, the bark is now more in evidence. Moosewood looks slender and striped as a ribbon-snake, and limbs of the hop-hornbeam have the appearance of sinews. Where a black and a white oak stand near together, the difference in color is as evident as between a negro and a white man. The white birch is to the winter woods what the dogwood is in spring, the maple in autumn. How is it the ancients did not metamorphose the fairest of all nymphs into this tree, so distinctly feminine is its beauty? Portions of bark outlast the wood, and are to be found standing erect and empty. The tree has departed, bequeathing its fair skin in token of a vanished loveliness. Now and then the yellow birch is seen in all its beauty, the golden inner bark shining through a silver filigree. To look at this tree is like looking at a picture or reading a poem: one feels somehow refreshed. Nor is the black birch without charm; its bark has a dusky beauty, and again shows fine wood colors and metallic tints similar to the black cherry. This fine luster the birch has in an eminent degree while most trees show it only on their small branches, if at all. Club-mosses appear to be a lesser growth of pines, a pygmy folk dwelling at the feet of the elder race. Here are miniature trunks and branches bearing miniature cones, perfect little conifers no higher than a chickadee. Ground-pine and trailing Christmas green thrive together on the bank, the latter with stems a yard long, which, while they grow at one end, die at the other. These little plants are crisp and green and refresh the eye on winter days, as does the Christmas fern, which affords a pleasant encounter at a time when one meets few acquaintances. It has, moreover, a certain charm of its own which doubtless lies in the crispness of the fronds and clear-cut outlines of the pinnæ. The marginal shield-fern is another acquaintance to be looked for on the winter walk, and everywhere the hardy polypody, which is as much a child of winter as the little spiny cladonia that clusters about its roots and clings to the same granite ledge. Let there come a warm rain, the high blueberries redden their twigs and the lichens renew their tints--quite as though Nature had softened her heart. These lichens suddenly become conspicuous with a sort of gentle prominence, and mildly compel attention; on the oaks the yellow cetraria, on the white pines, olive, slate-colored and blue-green parmelias. Had faun and satyr thus carved upon the forest trees the name of some fair Rosalind among the nymphs, they could not have wrought in more fitting and altogether sylvan characters.