There has been a light fall of snow, and a cold wind blows off the tidal marshes on the north side of the woods, but a warm wind is out and it is only half-winter. There is a cover of unmelted snow in shaded slopes and hollows. The buds are glassy and on twigs and branches small ice capsules reflect the light. Snow blankets the tangles of briar where rabbits have their runs. Tiny upmounded tunnels show where mice scuttle through the snow’s protection. Pheasant tracks are found on the way, and then the odd, creaky, fowl-like call of a pheasant sounds in the near distance. Several myrtle warblers are seen in a clearing on the south side of the woods, a sheltered area bordering on a tidal creek. In a marsh beyond the creek, which is running backwards because of the tide, cattails stand with a half cap of snow on their brown shako heads, on the side facing away from the sun. There is an icy glaze on the buds of a pussy willow. We are between north and south, winter and spring, snow and melted snow, arrested in clear parallels of beauty, turned toward the willingness of spring. Something calls to a slow and gentle attention that has been waiting in us. I wonder whether it is the identification of a pheasant’s tracks, or of a myrtle warbler, that they will remember in the future, or the special character of this day. It is hard to know what children perceive or retain. Suddenness, spontaneity, silence covers an untold number of impressions. Weeks, months, years later, they come out with something learned that a teacher could not have suspected. Occasionally they reveal an exactness which is innately theirs, quite apart from a classroom. I remember a little redheaded girl trying to tell us about a big white bird she had seen on the Chatham shore of the Cape. All description failed until she wagged her head back and forth in a special way, and we realized she had seen a snowy owl. Then there was a boy who characterized the blue jay as being “the loudest bird in the East,” which may have brought the jay out of the realm of science but not accuracy. But we lead in to nature through names as well as our senses, and then by familiarity with habits, size, shape, color, the order of change, the ways of dying out and returning with plants and animals. Knowledge is our medium, and we are obliged to question. What is that tree, strangely bent over along the snowy ground? A wild cherry? What happened to it? What is the evidence? Did another tree fall on it when it was a sapling, bend it down and force it to grow out horizontally? Its thick trunk stretches for six feet parallel to the ground, only a few inches above it, then turns and starts up into a sky-opening between the thickets beside it, sending up a wild array of branches. What else can we say about it?