Birds become less suspicious as the mercury falls, and they are hard pressed for food. The snow around the ragweeds is thickly covered with the tracks of bob-whites, like those of chickens, broad and firm, but with hardly any hind toe mark at all, as though they walked about on tiptoe. Very different from these are the long, triangular tracks of the jays, showing where they have hopped upon the snow. It is thus fairly tramped down and strewn with leaves and chaff where the bob-whites have fed, leaving these husks in token of their frugal meal. Such seed must be very small provender for these birds--much like a diet of crumbs for a hungry man. Goldfinches, juncos and tree-sparrows seek the same meager repast. The musical flocks of redpolls fare better in the alders around the pond. These are not to be seen every day, any more than the pine-siskins--perhaps not at all during several years. But occasionally an enormous flock will arrive and settle in the alders with all the chattering and commotion of a social and hungry company. As the seeds are shaken down upon the ice, the birds soon leave the bushes, and are under the table, so to speak. Crossbills have the easier time, feeding as they do on the seeds of the pine, for these are always available. No sound seems better to accord with the spirit of a still cold winter day than this faint crackling of opening cones, forced asunder by the shearing motion of the peculiar bills of these birds. Surely here is an adaptation to definite ends. Nature produces a cone that cannot readily be opened, and, as if relenting, produces a bird to open it. The wings of the seeds come zigzagging to the ground as the feast continues overhead--all that is destined to be planted. The lumbermen come into the woods with the crossbills, and everywhere is heard the winter music of the ax. It is good music enough, but it has a sinister purport, and the swish and boom of falling trees is a sad refrain. Ancient pines are laid low, singing to the last their brave and beautiful song, which seems to come, not directly from overhead, but remotely from the empyrean, as though it issued from the distant Court of the Winds. Of the pantheon of trees the village elm is the last to hold our homage; we have dethroned our idols. As the sound of the ax breaks the stillness, I find myself instinctively turning in the opposite direction, to escape that which is soon to follow--the swan-song of the forest primeval. LAUGHING WATERS