On the landward side were thickets of leafless rosebushes covered with scarlet hips; groves of tall, tree-like, smooth-barked alders; swampy tracts, wherein were ilex bushes bright with red Christmas berries, and blueberry bushes scarcely less bright with red leaves. Sometimes it was necessary to put up an opera-glass before I could tell one from the other. Here was a marshy spot; dry, shivering sedges standing above the ice, and among them four or five mud-built domes of muskrat houses. Shrewd muskrats! They knew better than to be stirring abroad on a day like this. “If you haven’t a house, why don’t you build one?” they might have said to the man hurrying past, with his neck drawn down into his coat collar. Here I skirted a purple cranberry bog, having tufts of dwarfed, stubby bayberry bushes scattered over it, each with its winter crop of pale-blue, densely packed, tightly held berry clusters. Not a flower; not a bird. Not so much as a crow or a robin in one of the stunted savin trees. I remembered winter days here, a dozen years ago, when the alder clumps were lively with tree sparrows, myrtle warblers, and goldfinches. Now the whole peninsula was a place forsaken. I had better have stayed away myself. Here, as so often elsewhere, memory was the better sight. By a summer cottage upon the rocks was a ledge matted over with the Japanese trailing white rose. There were no blossoms, of course, but what with the leaves, still of a glossy green, and the bunches of handsome, high-colored hips, the vine could hardly have been more beautiful, I was ready to say, even when the roses were thickest upon it. Beside another house a pink poppy still looked fresh. Frail, belated child of summer! I could hardly believe my eyes. All its human admirers were gone long since. Every cottage stood vacant. Nobody would live here in this icy wind, if he could find another place to flee to. I remembered Florida beaches, summery abodes, where every breath from the sea brought a welcome coolness. Why should I not take the next train southward? Shall a man be less sensible than a bird? That was five or six hours ago. Now I am a dozen miles inland. The air is so still that the sifting snowflakes fall straight downward. Even the finest twigs of the gray-birches, so sensitive to the faintest breath, can hardly be seen to stir. A narrow foot-path under the window is a line of white running through the green grass. Beyond that is the brown hillside, brightened with a few pitch-pines; and then a veil shuts down upon the world, with a spray of bare treetops breaking through. It is the gray month in its grayest mood.