Beautiful as that woodland is in early spring, it seemed that to-day there were more beauties still. The bracken was silver-dusted with frost and shone gold in the sunshine, and the green velvet of the mosses upon tree-trunk and ground only heightened by contrast the rich russet of the fern. I climbed to the russet seat on the rocky knoll above; there, sitting, I watched the gambolling of five squirrels and listened to the crackling as their sharp teeth made short work of the cones and fir-tufts. All these little merry feasters had put on their winter coats, and were much less {211} red of hue than when I watched them last in August. They had put on their winter tails also. I saw none of that curious white flaxen colour which the squirrel in September seems so proud of, as, with a wave of his brush, he dashes out of sight. There, as I watched these miracles of motion and alertness, I thought of Ruskin--how lovingly he had described them. Here was one leaping on to a twig that bent with just enough of swing in it to allow the little fellow to fly through the air to the next bough. Here was another, now running along the sturdier bough that bent not, now dropping five or six feet into a dark-green tuft, now sitting cosily in a forked branch to munch his midday meal, now racing for pure joy and mischief after his brother up a long tree-trunk, the tail sometimes bent in an arch above the tufted ears, again thrown out straight, and now bent and undulating--truly a balancing-pole, if ever one was needed by such expert gymnasts. Children of perfect knowledge of the woodland boughs, fearless as birds and swift as monkeys, the happy family rejoiced in the winter sunshine, as free of care as the cloudless sky above their heads. I moved, and the jay clanged and screamed from among {212} the alders below me, and in a moment the happy family had vanished out of sight, and one saw what an intercommunion of alarm against strange comers birds and beasts must surely have. Dropping down from this happy mount--and truly it has been called Mons Beata--I made my way through crackling fern across the chattering little brooklet to the second rocky height further to the southward. Blencathra lilac-grey and Walla Wood purple-brown and High Seat tawny yellow were reflected with such fidelity in the flood below one that the beauty of two worlds seemed to be given me. The tranquillity of the far-away fells was brought right across the flood to one's feet, a couple of wild duck dashed into the water, and with the ripplings of their sudden descent they set the whole fellside trembling. Looking now towards Cat Bels, one marvelled at the extraordinary beauty of the colour. Never was such bronze and gold seen to make the sky so blue, as one gazed up to the hummock of Cat Bels; whilst, between our rustic seat and the high road, the woodland hollow was filled with colour of gradation from silver-grey to purple-brown, and