To-day is the first of January, snowy, brilliant, but dripping with the sound of spring wherever the sun lies warm, and calling with the heart of spring yonder where the crows are flocking. There is spring in the talk of the chickadees outside my window, and in the cheerful bluster of a red squirrel in the hickory. No bluebird has returned yet: spring is not here, not quite, I hope, but it is coming, and so near that I shall drop my pen and go out to the barn to put together some new beehives, for I must have them ready for the spring. Winter! The winter is almost gone. Why, it is barely a month since I brought my bees into the cellar, and here I am taking them out again—in prospect. The hives have just come from the factory “in the flat”: sawed, planed, dovetailed, and matched,—a delightful set of big blocks,—ready to be nailed together. You feel a bit mean, keeping them from the children. But the oldest of the boys is only six, and he had a walking bear for Christmas. Besides, when you were a _little_ boy you never had many blocks, and never a walking bear. So you keep the hives. And how suddenly the January day goes! You hammer on into the deepening dusk, and the chickens go to roost without their supper. You would have hammered on all night, but the hives ran out. Five hives won’t last very long; and you sigh as they stand finished. You could wish them all in pieces to do over again, so smooth the stock, so fragrant the piny smell, so accurate and nice the parts from cover to bottom board! Winter! with January started, and February two days short! It is all a fiction. You had dreams of long evenings, of books and crackling fires, and of days shut in. It still snows; there is something still left of the nights, but not half enough, for the seed catalogues are already beginning to arrive. The snow lies a foot deep over the strawberry bed and the frozen soil where the potatoes are to be. Yet the garden grows—on paper? No, not on paper, but in your own eager soul. The joy of a garden is as real in January as in June. And so the winter goes. For if it is not the garden and the bees, it is some of a thousand other chores that keep you busy and living past the present,—and past the present is the spring. I am watching for the phœbes to return to the shed,—they are my first birds. I long to hear the shrill piping of the March frogs, to pick a blue hepatica from beneath the pines; for these are some of the things, besides cheaper rent, more room, more boys, fresh air, quiet, and a cow, that one lives for here on the farm. But I am not waiting, winter-sick, for I have stored the summer in attic and cellar; I am already having my spring—in prospect; and as for the actual winter, the snow-bound days are all too few for the real winter joys of this simple, ample life, here in the quiet, among the neighbor fields. [Illustration] IV The Nature-Student I I HAD made a nice piece of dissection, a pretty demonstration—for a junior.