I laid the spray of green holly on the hard white crust of the January snow. Then I stood a moment and spread my hands out over it to warm them! It was like a little fire in the snow. The boys laughed at me. They were warm enough in their mittens. But I had need of more than mittens to warm my fingers. I had need of a fire,--a fire of green pointed holly leaves and one glowing, flaming berry, a tiny red hot coal of summer blazing here in the wide white ashes of the winter. We were tacking again now in order to get back on our course, and had got into the edge of the swamp among the pines when the boy with the shovel began to study the ground and the trees as if trying to find the location of something. “Here it is,” he said, and began digging through the snow at the foot of a big pine. I knew what he was after. It was goldthread, and here was the only spot in all the woods about where we had ever found it, a spot no larger than the top of a dining-room table. Soon we had a fistful of the delicate plants with their evergreen leaflets and long golden, threadlike roots that, mixed with the red and green of the partridge-berry in a finger-bowl, make a cheerful winter bouquet. And here with the goldthread, about the butt of the pine, was the partridge-berry, too, the dainty vines strung with the beads which seemed to burn holes in the snow that covered and banked their tiny fires. For this is all that the ice and snow had done. The winter had come with enough wind to blow out every flame in the maple-tops, and with enough snow to smother every little fire in the peat-bogs of the swamp; but peat fires are hard to put out; and here and everywhere the winter had only banked the fires of summer. Dig down through the snow ashes anywhere, and the smouldering coals of life burst into blaze. When that red-beaded partridge-vine was hastily placed with the goldthread in the covered basket, and the spray of holly put with them, a ray of light began to dawn on my snow-clouded mind. Did I begin to see the bouquet these boys were after? I said nothing. They said nothing. They were watching me, though, I knew, to see how long I should stumble blindly on through these glorious January woods, which were so full of joy for them. I say I said nothing. I was thinking hard, however. “Holly, goldthread, partridge-berry,” I thought to myself. “I see so much of the birthday bouquet. But what else can they find?” The boy with the axe had again gone on ahead. And we were off again after him, stopping to get a great armful of black alder branches that were literally aflame with red berries. We were climbing a piny knoll when almost at our feet, jumping us nearly out of our skins, and warming the very roots of our hair, was a burrrr! burrrr! burrrr! burrrr!--four big partridges--as if four snow-mines had exploded under us, hurling bunches of brown feathers on graceful scaling wings over the dip of the hill!