Here, too, the sagacious musk-rat built his cemented dome, and along the neighboring shore we set the chained steel-traps, or made the ponderous dead-fall from nature’s rude materials. Yonder, in the side-hill woods, I set the big box rabbit-traps; with keen-edged jack-knife trimmed the slender hickory poles, and on the ground near by, with sharpened, branching sticks, I built the little pens for my twitch-up snares. Can I ever forget the fascinating excitement which sped me on from snare to snare in those tramps through the snowy woods, the exhilarating buoyancy of that delicious suspense, every nerve and every muscle on the _qui vive_ in my eagerness for the captured game! Even the memory of it acts like a tonic, and almost creates an appetite like that of old. And then the lovely woods. How few there are who ever seek their winter solitude: and of these how fewer still are they who find anything but drear and cold monotony! We read the literature of our time, and find it rich in story of the home aspects of winter; of Christmas joys and festivals, of holiday festivities, and all the various phases of cosy domestic life; but not often are we tempted from the glowing hearth into the wilds of the bare and leafless forest. We read of the “drear and lonely waste, the cheerless desolation of the howling wilderness,” and we look out upon the naked, shivering trees and draw our cushioned rockers closer to the grateful fire. [Illustration: THE FIRST SNOW.] Not I; bitter were the winds and high the piled-up drifts that shut me in from out-of-doors in those glorious days; and whether on my animated trapping tours, or hunting on the crusted snow, with powder-horn and game-bag swinging at my side, or perhaps pressing through the tangled thickets in my impetuous search for those pendulous cocoons, now stopping to tear away the loosening bark on moss-grown stump, now looking beneath some prostrate board for the little “woolly bears” curled up in their dormant sleep: no matter what my purpose, always I was sure to find the winter full of interest and beauty. How distinctly I recall the thrilling spectacle of that glad morning when, awakening early, and jumping from the little cot so snug and warm, I tripped across the chilly floor and scratched a peep-hole on the frosted window-pane; looked out upon a world so changed, so strangely beautiful, that at first it seemed like a lingering vision in half-awakened eyes--still looking into dream-land. All the world is dressed in purest white, as soft and light as down from seraphs’ wings. The orchard trees, the elms, and all the leafless shrubs, as if by magic spell, transformed to shadowy plumes of spotless purity, and the interlacing boughs o’erhead vanishing in a canopy of glistening, feathery spray. I look upon a realm celestial in its beauty, unprofaned by earthly sign or sound. A strange, supernal stillness fills the air; and save where some