that the following confession will be valued as it ought. Some time ago the number of Arctic sea-fowl in our creeks and bays, and the near approach of a rather early fall of snow to the sea line, justified us, as we thought, in predicting an early and severe winter, meaning by "severe"--for we scorn to be disingenuous in the matter--that it was likely to be excessively cold as well as unusually stormy. The experience of upwards of twenty years, during which we have been a keen and close student of meteorological phenomena and wild-bird life, seemed to us to warrant the conclusion at which we had arrived. But how at mid-winter stands the fact? Why, thus: that up to this date [January 1874], it has been, upon the whole, the "openest" and mildest season for at least a quarter of a century! How, then, about your Arctic sea-birds? the reader may exclaim, and we can only answer that their presence so early and in such numbers is to be accounted for by the almost incessant gales that have been sweeping over the Atlantic and northern seas, with such disastrous effects, for nearly two months past. Feeling the first blast of the approaching tempest, and assured of its prolonged continuance by a marvellous instinct, further and more correctly prescient of such matters than man, with all his boasted science, they fled to the shelter of our, to them in such cases, Friendly Islands; for an Arctic web-foot dreads an unusual severity of hyperborean storms, long continued, quite as much as it dreads an excessive intensity of hyperborean cold, and for the same reason--both equally interfere with the allotted comforts of its economy and due supply of food. The winter, besides, is not yet past; whistling before one is fairly out of the wood is proverbially foolish, and there is, after all, time enough yet betwixt this and the vernal equinox for the advent of any amount of cold, so that there is still a chance for our wild-bird friends and ourselves standing higher in the reader's estimation as weather prophets, ere the winter is ended, than we do at present. Our web-foot visitors from the far north, at all events, are still with us, and in large numbers, and a very pretty sight a flock of them is as you quietly approach them congregated in some sheltered bay, and with a good binocular watch their graceful motions, now disporting themselves and chasing each other in many a merry round over the surface of the water; now, as if by common consent and in obedience to some, to you inaudible, word of command, they seem to leap rather than dive into the blue depths beneath them, until not one is to be seen, then as suddenly reappearing, again to chase each other, and disport and dive, as if they knew you were looking at them, and admired and loved them, and would as soon cut off your finger as think of levelling a murder-dealing weapon at creatures so beautiful and harmless.