The season was opened, formally, on the 10th of March. I am speaking for myself. Friday, the 8th, brought genuine spring weather, sunny and warm, an ideal day for the first bluebird; but I was obliged to waste it in the city. The 9th was rainy and cold, and though I spent some hours out-of-doors, I saw no vernal signs. Birds of all sorts were never so few. The next morning--cloudy, with a raw northeasterly wind--I was fifteen minutes away from home when a squirrel came out of the woods on one side of the way and ran across the road before me. It was a chipmunk, my first one of the new year, wide-awake and quick on its legs; and it was hardly in the hazel bushes on the other side of the road before another joined it, and the two chased each other out of sight. Spring had come. Chickarees and gray squirrels have been common enough throughout the cold weather, but the chipmunk, or striped squirrel, takes to its burrow in the late autumn, and sleeps away the winter. In other words, along with the woodchuck (the largest and the smallest of our New England squirrels being alike in this respect), it migrates--into the “land of Nod.” I imagine, however, that its sleep is not so sound but that it wakes up now and then to feed, though as to this point I know really nothing, my impression arising wholly from the fact that chipmunks store away food. They would hardly do this, I should think, unless they expected to find a use for it. Late in September, five months ago, I went to visit friends in the White Mountains, and one of the first things I heard from them was that Betty had disappeared. She had not been seen for about two months. Betty was a chipmunk that had been in the habit of coming upon the piazza, and had grown tame under kind treatment till she would take food from her friends’ fingers and even climb into their laps. Once, indeed, the lady of the house, having gone upstairs, noticed the presence of something heavy in her pocket (she is a naturalist, and for that reason, I suppose, still wears a pocket in her gown), and on putting her hand into it, found Betty inside. But, as I say, Betty had suddenly discontinued her visits, and there was mourning at the cottage. Worse yet, there was wrath, and the stable cat had barely escaped with his life. But now, on a Sunday noon, when the cottagers appeared at the hotel dinner-table, they announced with beaming faces that there was great news: Betty had returned! I must come over and see her; for up to this time I knew her charms only by report.