For its days of quiet sparkle we would remember January, not for lashing tempests, April delusions, or brooding fog. Unbroken snow with blazing spangles shifting as the sun moves, and above it twittering sparrows clinging by one claw to stalks of yarrow or mustard while they shake the seeds loose with the other; old stone walls suddenly demonstrating that they have color, when the foreground is white, and showing bluish, brown, earthen red, and gray alight with mica; streams covered with pearly ice that floods into brilliant orange at sunset; spruce and hemlock imperiously outlined on even far-off hills; skating-time without and kindled logs within—that is the midwinter we remember when the sterner messengers sped from the Pole have gone again. Were it not for the blizzard we might fail to know so well the comforting symbolism of firelight at play upon clean hearths. Many go all their lives, aware only of the coziness or inconvenience of winter, never facing the daggered gale alone, nor struck by the terror of a hostile Nature or the awe of cold that may not soon relent. What one perceives in the volcano, tidal wave, or blizzard, another is spared; the lesson, perhaps, being postponed until he is ready for it. Spring comes sweetly to the milliners’ this month. To the wilderness with rapid and menacing step comes full winter. CHAPTER II. A WOODLAND VALENTINE [Illustration] Forces astir in the deepest roots grow restless beneath the lock of frost. Bulbs try the door. February’s stillness is charged with a faint anxiety, as if the powers of light, pressing up from the earth’s center and streaming down from the stronger sun, had troubled the buried seeds, who strive to answer their liberator, so that the guarding mother must whisper over and over, “Not yet, not yet!” Better to stay behind the frozen gate than to come too early up into realms where the wolves of cold are still aprowl. Wisely the snow places a white hand over eager—life unseen, but perceived in February’s woods as a swimmer feels the changing moods of water in a lake fed by springs. Only the thick stars, closer and more companionable than in months of foliage, burn alert and serene. In February the Milky Way is revealed divinely lucent to lonely peoples—herdsmen, mountaineers, fishermen, trappers—who are abroad in the starlight hours of this grave and silent time of year. It is in the long, frozen nights that the sky has most red flowers.