Now I take up another freckled, easily broken twig, with noticeably short branchlets, some of them less than an inch in length. Every one, even the shortest, is set with brown globular buds of the size of pin-heads. Toward the tip the main stem also bears clusters of such tiny spheres. If you do not know the branch by sight, I must ask you to smell or taste the bark. “Sassafras?” No, though the guess is not surprising. It is spice-bush. The buds are flower-buds. The shrub is one of our very early bloomers, and makes its preparations accordingly. While flowers are still scarce enough to attract universal attention, it is thickly covered with sessile or almost sessile yellow rosettes, till it looks for all the world like the early-flowering cornel (_Cornus Mas_), which blossoms about the same time in gardens. Seeing these spice-bush buds, though January is still young, I can almost see May-day; and when I snap the brittle stem and sniff the fresh wood, I can almost believe that I have snapped off half a century from my life. What a good and wholesome smell it is! Among the best of nature’s own. Here is a poplar twig, with well-developed, shapely buds. I pull off the outer coverings and lay bare a mass of woolly fibres, fine and soft, within which the tender blossoms lie in germ. And next is a willow stem. Already, though winter is no more than a fortnight old, the “pussy” has begun to push off its dark coverlid, as if it were in haste to be up and feel the sun. Yes, spring will soon be here, and the willow proposes not to be caught napping. These long, slender, cinnamon-colored, silky buds, like shoemakers’ awls for shape, are from a beech tree. The package is done up so tightly and skillfully that my clumsy human fingers cannot undo it without tearing it in pieces. Layer after layer I remove, taking all pains, and here at the heart is the softest of vegetable silk. How did the wood learn to secrete such delicacies, and to wrap them with such miraculous security? Why could it not wait till spring, and save the need of all this caution? I do not know. How should I? But I am glad of every such vernal prophecy, as well as of every such proof of vegetable intelligence. It would be strange if a beech tree could not do some things better than you and I can. Every dog knows his own trick.