In Grant Allen's "Flash Lights on Nature," you will find that the Soldanella sisters store food in their leaves all winter just as we put things away in the cellar, and how this helps them get up so early in the spring; why the fact that the little sisters are not very tall makes them hurry so; and why if they _didn't_ hurry they wouldn't get to the party at all! What other members of the primrose family do you know? See what you can find about our earliest flowers--hepatica, bloodroot, dog-toothed violet, jack-in-the-pulpit, Dutchman's breeches, anemones. If you will examine closely many early spring buds and flowers--especially those like the willow and hazel catkins--you will find that they too keep warm and grow in the early spring, not from the warmth of the sun alone but from the fuel they have laid up in their buds. Did you know that to see the very first flowers of all in the spring you must look up--away above your head? (_Maple._) Any good book on Alaska will tell a number of striking things about how rapidly spring comes on in the lands where glaciers grow. Get Muir's "Mountains of California" and hear him tell about how he went down into a crevasse in his shirt-sleeves, and of the fairy underworld he found there, and how he hated to come away. Reclus[11] tells how the glaciers not only come down to call on the farmers, sometimes, but even help them pick cherries! [Footnote 11: "The Earth."] I suppose the children who go to the excellent Swiss schools take delight in telling grandmother that Mr. Glacier isn't really a person--as he is in the tales of the winter fireside--but wouldn't both grandmother and the children open their eyes if they knew that in Greenland there is a glacier so big it feeds itself and makes its own snow and its own storms and everything? Hobb's "The Face of the Earth" tells all about it. And the Encyclopædia Britannica and Hobbs together will tell you how to make a good glacier. There are a half-dozen things you must remember or your glacier won't turn out right. (1) You must take plenty of snow; (2) and keep it in a cool place; (3) but you must warm it a little too, once in a while; (4) your mountain gorges must not be too steep; (5) you must have your mountains set just so; (6) and distribute your storms with care. By doing all these things you get fine, durable glaciers, 100 to 200 feet thick, sometimes 500 and even 1,000 feet thick. But you must be careful, and, of course, it takes time. CHAPTER IV (APRIL) Now the noisy winds are still; April's coming up the hill! All the spring is in her train, Led by shining ranks of rain. --_Mary Mapes Dodge._ THE APRIL RAINS AND THE WORK OF THE RIVERS