It was in the latter end of December, upon a gloomy day that was heavy with the oppression of a coming storm. In the heart of the maple swamp all was still and cold and dead. Suddenly, as out of a tomb, I heard the small, thin cry of a tiny tree frog. And how small and thin it sounded in the vast silences of that winter swamp! And yet how clear and ringing! A thrill of life tingling out through the numb, nerveless body of the woods that has ever since made a dead day for me impossible. That was an inspiration. I learned something, something deep and beautiful. Had I been Burns or Wordsworth I should have written a poem to Hyla. All prose as I am, I was, nevertheless, so quickened by that brave little voice as to write:— The fields are bleak, the forests bare, The swirling snowflakes fall About the trees a winding-sheet, Across the fields a pall. A wide, dead waste, and leaden sky, Wild winds, and dark and cold! The river’s tongue is frozen thick, With life’s sweet tale half told. Dead! Ah, no! the white fields sleep, The frozen rivers flow; And summer’s myriad seed-hearts beat Within this breast of snow. With spring’s first green the holly glows And flame of autumn late,— The embers of the summer warm In winter’s roaring grate. The thrush’s song is silent now, The rill no longer sings, But loud and long the strong winds strike Ten million singing strings. O’er mountains high, o’er prairies far, Hark! the wild pæan’s roll! The lyre is strung ’twixt ocean shores And swept from pole to pole! My meeting with that frog in the dead of winter was no trifling experience, nor one that the biologist ought to fail to understand. Had I been a poet, that meeting would have been of consequence to all the world; as I was, however, it meant something only to me,—a new point of view, an inspiration,—a beautiful poem that I cannot write. This attitude of the nature-lover, because it is contemplative and poetical, is not therefore mystical or purely sentimental. Hooting at the owls and hearing things in baffling silences may not be scientific. Neither is it unscientific. The attitude of the boy beside the starlit lake is not that of Charlie, the man who helps me occasionally on the farm. We were clearing up a bit of mucky meadow recently when we found a stone just above the surface that was too large for the horse to haul out. We decided to bury it. Charlie took the shovel and mined away under the rock until he struck a layer of rather hard sandstone. He picked a while at this, then stopped a while; picked again, rather feebly, then stopped and began to think about it. It was hard work,—the thinking, I mean, harder than the picking,—but Charlie, however unscientific, is an honest workman, so he thought it through.