Is it summer? I would catch the fragrant breeze at dawn, and mark the day’s beauteous progress step by step; gather good cheer from the merry thrushes’ song, and chirp as lustily as the robin though my task be long. Even at noontide, be it never so sultry, I would take heart from the brave field-sparrow’s hopeful tone, and lighten my labor with the anticipation of long hours of rest, when the world’s best gift comes to the fore—a moonlit summer night. Surely it is something to go hand in hand with the year’s ripening harvest, for Nature unfolds many a secret then, more strange than any fairy tale and more helpful than any fevered fancy of vague theorist. Armed with such knowledge, the countryman is well equipped to solve the problem of his life; and does not the toiler in the town ask more frequently than all others that fearful question, Is life worth living? Is it autumn? The recompense for bearing the heat and burden of the year’s long day is ours. What joy to contemplate the heaped-up treasures of a fruitful summer, and know they are yours by right of a worthy conquest wherein no one suffered wrong! Nor is Nature less beautiful or less communicative now. Indeed, I hold her even more so. The ruddy tints of the forest leaf mark the completion of a summer’s labor to which we have given little heed as it progressed; but the woodlands invite us now to see how beautiful as well as useful a tree may be, and open their doors to “an annual exhibition” at which the world may well wonder. I would rather have the autumn landscape before my door than its counterfeit on canvas hung upon the wall. It is a comfort to know that, be the former ever so gaudy, it can not be said to be unnatural. Thank the stars! critics are dumb, whatever the garb Nature sees fit to put on. Is it winter? In a broad sense the world is now at rest, but one need not sit down and mope because of it. It is a happy lot to be able to lead a contemplative life; the better if it alternates with periods of activity. And never a winter so dead as to be unsuggestive, not even though the rigor of an arctic one be upon us. If the familiar river no longer flows by, brimming, blue, and sparkling, flecked with the white sails of busy craft or fretted with the tireless splash of hissing steamers, what of the rugged highway it becomes for the wild life that braves the north wind and its attendant storms? Whoso studies the flocks of dainty sparrows that throng the wide, wind-swept wastes in winter should have courage enough to face the world at all seasons. What a pulpit becomes a cake of ice whereon a tree-sparrow is singing! and I have heard hundreds of warbling sparrows when the day was cold and dreary beyond description.