This was getting livelier all the time. From my study window how dead and deserted, and windswept and bare the world had looked to me! Nothing but a live crow winging wearily against the leaden sky! But out here in the real woods and meadows--partridges, chickadees, hairy woodpecker, blue jay, and muskrats as well as crows! And then I knew a certain old apple tree where a pair of screech owls were wintering. And, as for white-footed mice, I could find them in any stump. Besides, here were rabbit holes in the snow, and up in a tall pine a gray squirrel’s nest and-- But I was losing sight of the boy with the axe who was leading the procession. On we went up over the knoll and down into a low bog where in the summer we gathered high-bush blueberries, the boy with the axe leading the way and going straight across the ice toward the middle of the bog. My eye was keen for signs, and I soon saw he was heading for a sweet-pepper bush with a broken branch. My eye took in another bush a little to the right also with a broken branch. The boy with the axe walked up to the sweet-pepper bush, and drew a line on the ice between it and a bush off on the right, pacing off this line till he found the middle; then he started at right angles from it, and paced off a line to a clump of cat-tails sticking up through the ice on the flooded bog. Halfway back on this line he stopped, threw off his coat, and began to chop a hole about two feet square in the ice. Removing the block of ice while I looked on, he rolled up his sleeve, and reached down the length of his arm through the ice water. “Give me the shovel,” he said, “it’s down here.” And with a few dexterous cuts he soon brought to the surface a beautiful cluster of pitcher-plants, the strange, almost uncanny, leaves filled with muddy water, but every pitcher of them intact, shaped and veined and tinted by a master potter’s hand. Now at last I fully understood. Now I could see what those boys had been seeing with their inward eyes all the time. Now I had faith, too. But how late! The bouquet of flowers was now full. We wrapped the wonderful pitcher-plant carefully in newspapers, and put it into the basket, starting back with our bouquet as cheerfully, and as full of joy in the season, as we could possible have been in June. No, I did not say that we love January as much as we love June. January here in New England is a mixture of rheumatism, chilblains, frozen water-pipes, mittens, overshoes, blocked trains, and automobile-troubles by the hoodsful, whereas any automobile will run in June. It is so in Delaware and Texas and Oregon, too.