The north wind _may_ blow, for it is by no means a cheerless prospect, this wood-and-meadow world of mine in the gray November light. The grass-blades are wilting, the old leaves are falling; but no square foot of greensward will the winter kill, nor a single tree perhaps in all my wood-lot. There will be little less of life next April because of this winter. The winter birds will suffer most, and a few may die. Last February, I came upon two partridges in the snow, dead of hunger and cold. It was after an extremely long “severe spell”; but this was not the only cause. These two birds since fall had been feeding regularly in the dried fodder corn that stood shocked over the field. One day all the corn was carted away. The birds found their supply of food suddenly cut off, and, unused to foraging the fence-rows and tangles for wild seeds, they seem to have given up the struggle at once, although within easy reach of plenty. Hardly a minute’s flight away was a great thicket of dwarf sumac covered with berries. There were bayberries, rosehips, greenbrier, bittersweet, black alder, and checkerberries that they might have found. These berries would have been hard fare, doubtless, after an unstinted supply of sweet corn; but still they were plentiful and would have been sufficient had the birds made use of them. The smaller birds that stay through the winter, like the tree sparrow and the junco, feed upon the weeds and grasses that ripen unmolested along the roadsides and in the waste places. A mixed flock of these small birds lived several days last winter upon the seeds of the ragweed in my mowing-field. The weeds came up in the early fall after the field was sowed to clover and timothy. They threatened to choke out the grass. I looked at them and thought with dismay of how they would cover the field by another fall. After a time the snow came, a foot and a half of it, till only the tops of the seedy ragweeds showed above the level white. Then the juncos, goldfinches, and tree sparrows came; and there was a five-day shucking of ragweed seed on the crusty snow--five days of life and plenty for the birds. Then I looked again, and thought that weeds and winters, which were made when the world was made--that even ragweeds and winters have a part in the beautiful divine scheme of things. “The north wind doth blow And we shall have snow”-- but the wild geese are going over; the wild mice have harvested their acorns; the bees have clustered; the woodchucks have gone to sleep; the muskrats have nearly finished their lodge; the sap in the big hickory tree by the side of the house has crept down out of reach of the fingers of the frost. And what has become of Robin, poor thing? CHAPTER X AN OUTDOOR LESSON