I hurried up! Scuffs and boots and cap and reefer on in a jiffy, and the five of us were soon in single file upon the meadow, the dry snow squealing under our feet, while the little imp-winds, capering fitfully about us, blew the snowdust into our faces, or catching up the thin drifts, sent them whirling and waltzing, like ghostly dancers, over the meadow’s level glittering floor. I was beginning to warm up a little; but I was still guessing about the flowers, and not yet in the spirit of the game. We were having a hard winter, and the novelty of zero weather was beginning to wear off--at least to me. The fact was I had intended to get the birthday flowers down at the greenhouse in the village. January is an awkward time to have a birthday, anyhow. June is a much more reasonable month for birthdays, if you gather wild flowers for the celebration. The fields are full of flowers in June! But here in January you must go with an axe and a shovel, mittens, rubber-boots, and reefers! And I confess I couldn’t make head or tail of this festive trip. It is a lucky man who has boys, or who knows and “trains,” as our New Englanders say, with boys. They won’t let him freeze up. “Come, father,” they say, “get into your scuffs and boots, and hit the old trail for the woods!” And father drops his pen; bundles up; “clomps” out in his boots, grumbling at the weather and the boys and the birthdays and the stiffness in his knees and in his soul--for a whole hundred yards or more into the meadow! Then he begins to warm up. Then he takes the axe from one of the boys and looks at its edge, and “hefts” it; and looks about for a big birthday flower, about the size of a hundred-year-old oak, to chop down. Something queer is happening to father. He is forgetting his knees; he is capering about on the snow; he is getting ahead of the boys; he hardly realizes it, but he is beginning to feel like a birthday inside of him; and he will soon be in danger of getting this January day mixed up with the days of June! But not right off. I was warming up, I do confess, yet it was a numb, stiff world about us, and bleak and stark. It was a world that looked all black and white, for there was not a patch of blue overhead. The white underfoot ran off to meet the black of the woods, and the woods in turn stood dark against a sky so heavy with snow as to shut us apparently into some vast snow cave. A crow flapping over drew a black pencil-line across the picture--the one sign of life that we could see besides ourselves. Only small boys are likely to leave their firesides on such a day; only small boys and those men who can’t grow up. Yet never before, perhaps, had boys or men ever gone afield on such a tramp with an axe, a shovel, and a basket.