Although loving the cold, and choosing the winter season to be with us, the snow-birds cannot hold their own against the little hardy chickadee. Indeed, I sometimes think that this little frost-proof puff is happier and more sprightly in proportion as the cold increases, and that even the sight of a frozen thermometer would be, perhaps, an especial inspiration for his song. Not so the little snow-birds. When those raw and bitter winds sweep like a blight over the face of nature, their little song is frozen, and their familiar forms are seen no more. You hunt amid the evergreens and hedge-rows, but they are not there. But when the shingle-vane on the old barn-gable veers and points toward the south or west, should you chance to be in the neighborhood of the barrack mow, you would hear the muffled twittering of the little thawing voices underneath the conical roof. Here they have assembled among the wheat-sheaves still unthreshed, finding a warm and cosy shelter--“a pavilion till the storm is overpast.” The winter woods are full of life and beauty, if we will only look for them. We do as much for the summer woods, why not for the winter? Were we to seclude ourselves in-doors in June, and shut our eyes to all its loveliness, it would be only what so many do from November till the budding spring. In one respect, at least, the woods are even more beautiful in winter than in summer; for in their height of leafy splendor--sometimes to me almost oppressive in its universal greenness--the true and living tree is hidden from sight, its exquisite anatomy is concealed, and, to a certain degree, all the different trees melt into a mass of “nothing but leaves.”